Have no artistic talent? Want to make photographic-style backgrounds?
Chinese researchers have invented a way to automatically turn a stick-figure sketch into a high-quality photo montage. It's pretty amazing. Could be very useful to quickly create game backgrounds. And the application is freely available, too.
Have a look (http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm).
I just watched the video. It seems like a very cool concept. I will have to check this out later.
I am at work now and it's almost time to leave.
Thanks for that link Snarky.
Very interesting. We'll replace artists with machines yet! :P
I showed people in #ags this just the other day. It looks amazing.
Mind you, as I understand it's only a concept for now. But it would actually be pretty cool to make a game with BG art coming out of such an app.
While clever, I doubt it would have many practical uses. Maybe for a advertising layout photoshopper to quickly prototype compositions, but not much else.
:o
That's pretty amazing!
Quote from: Layabout on Sat 10/10/2009 13:26:43
While clever, I doubt it would have many practical uses. Maybe for a advertising layout photoshopper to quickly prototype compositions, but not much else.
Agreed.
What I consider much cooler, is this new feature in Photoshop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKjs8ZjQNg
So blue box technology is suddenly obsolete? I'll believe it when can I try the program myself.
Truly amazing if it actually works though.
Quote from: Mr Matti on Sat 10/10/2009 15:04:34
Quote from: Layabout on Sat 10/10/2009 13:26:43
While clever, I doubt it would have many practical uses. Maybe for a advertising layout photoshopper to quickly prototype compositions, but not much else.
Agreed.
What I consider much cooler, is this new feature in Photoshop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKjs8ZjQNg
That's cool, super cool.
Quote from: Miez on Sat 10/10/2009 10:08:05
Mind you, as I understand it's only a concept for now. But it would actually be pretty cool to make a game with BG art coming out of such an app.
No, it's a working technology. You can download it from here (http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/files/Binary.zip).
Quote from: Layabout on Sat 10/10/2009 13:26:43
While clever, I doubt it would have many practical uses. Maybe for a advertising layout photoshopper to quickly prototype compositions, but not much else.
I do actually think that it could be pretty useful for making adventure game backgrounds. Even if you're going to end up drawing it yourself, this can help you brainstorm from simple sketches to create richer and more detailed images, and lets you produce photo references that can improve your drawing.
The Photoshop tool is cool, too. In general, there's a lot of amazing work coming out of SIGGRAPH and other graphics researchers in image manipulation. The effects look a lot like magic. I wonder how well they would perform on pixel art.
I agree this is very cool for people that have trouble making backgrounds! For me personally I still prefer making it all myself from scratch, but I can see how this would be very appealing for people that do not like to (or cannot) do it on their own! Really interesting to see these new techs that are coming out.
Neat, but I can't get it to work. When I try to run any of the applications it says it can't find cxcore110.dll. Not sure where to find such a file or where to put it. I'd try reading the manual, but it's loading at dial-up-like speeds.
According to Slashdot (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/09/1539232/PhotoSketch-Image-Manipulation-Tool-Taking-the-World-by-Storm), you need these libraries (http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/opencv-win/1.0/chopencv-2.5.0-win-binary.zip/download).
... Which in turn need the Ch (http://www.softintegration.com/) interpreter. Anyway, once you get it to run, it still apparently relies on you providing a folder of source images. (Which is good in the sense that you can more easily control the result, but rather reduces the utility as a "make my image" tool, since you need to get hold of good source images yourself.)
So even if the system works, I guess we still really need to wait for a more user-friendly implementation to actually take advantage of it.
I was wondering why the source images in that video were so good, i doubt it's possible to sort through all the shit that google images pushes out.
I think I'm more interested in the technology they used to key out the backgrounds, leaving the object intact. That would be a godsend for cheap character capture for film. You wouldn't have to worry about messing around with keying out the green screen - it would detect and remove it anyway.
I wonder how it deals with translucent objects.
Hidden item games just got even cheaper to make!
Now, someone will bug CJ to implement something similar in AGS to bring the "Maek Mi Gaem" feature work. :=
Delete please.
That CS5 patch stuff looks amazing. Now that would be damn useful.