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During the Ubisoft Developers Conference in Montreal last week, Ubisoft shared a closer look at the way they use AI and machine learning.
To make sure it worked before we put it in the hands of production, we froze the process and observed a couple of productions for three to six months, I believe. Just to see how they behave, what are the bugs they created. Based on their history, we simply ran a program saying how many of those bugs would we have caught in that time. By doing that and estimating false alarms, etc. we came to the assumption that it was about 20 per cent of the work that had been done by this team during this time.
When we first introduced mocap, it was perceived as a threat, like it would cut animators’ jobs. It was the opposite. The mocap was facilitating animation a lot. It was helping animators to focus on where they have real added value, which is the emotion, the spectacular aspect of the animation. We created more spectacular animation, we wanted more animation in games, which created more animators at the end of the day.
Yves Jacquier
Just think about the possibilities of these technologies: Ubisoft’s AI programs can now generate assets for games that are about 80 per cent as good as what artist can do.
Today the AI can redo the job for very specific things, such as text-to-speech, as long as you don’t put in emotion. Or animation, but only for locomotion. Facial animation, as long as you don’t expect emotion on the face but mostly leaps, moving, etc.
I think it will take three years before you can have a fully generated NPC in a game,” he said. “A character with its own animation, modeling, facial expression, text-to-speech with different emotions or variation. And that’s totally comparable to something you’re doing today with animators, people who are specialists in speech, modelers, etc.
Yves Jacquier
You can learn more about the Commit Assistant in a thorough report by gamesindustry.biz.