AI Concepting: From 3 Hours to 30 Minutes, Thanks to Scenario.gg

I've been using Scenario.gg for a bit now, and it's been great for creating environment design mockups I can directly translate into 3D environments. It’s brought a 3-hour process down to 30 minutes.

Example for AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, our upcoming skydiving game:

These are all screenshots of Aaaaa! from levels I created by hand in Unity. I fine-tuned Scenario on these, then generated a bunch of images based on those:

The initial output was good, but a bit samey, and often hewed pretty close to the source material. So, I mixed it up a bit, in part by using different keywords:

“Daytime,” “Aztec",” and so forth. That yielded a greater variety in output. I then snagged one image that looked promising:

It, itself, was pretty close to one of my original screenshots (a contentious topic in AI art, but in this case, I created the level myself), but it was enough of a variation to be useful.

I then dove into Unity and created this. It’s a WiP, but only took me 30 minutes (minus the time waiting for training and image synthesis, during which I played Polytopia a bunch).

That 30 minutes is key here. Over the past few years, I’ve been dabbling in environment design, as I’ve always wanted to see what I could do. It takes me a lot of time to create stuff like this (and that’s even with using off-the-shelf decals):

It takes me that long, in part because I’m still a relative noob when it comes to this stuff; but also because I tend to do my concepting in-engine.

As a result, to try something, I have to drop into Substance Designer and Photoshop for textures, model a bunch of stuff, set up the lighting, move it around, and so forth. And if it doesn’t look good, then I trash it all and try again.

With these ML tools, I can just remix my screenshots and get a usable concept. That’s 3 hours down to 30 minutes for me, so cheers to Emmanuel and his team. :)