What you need to know
- Google debuted Chimera Painter, a machine learning tool that turns sketches into 3D-renders.
- It's available on the web, and users can either create their sketches there or download a pre-set and build it out in an alternate app like Photoshop.
- Chimera Painter is ultimately a proof of concept that showcases the time-saving potential of machine-learning in digital art generation.
Google today debuted an experiment aimed at making building rendered art easier and faster with machine learning. The company shared Chimera Painter, a demo tool that automatically renders monsters from an outline you supply.
With Chimera Painter, Google is using machine learning to speed up the 3D art production process. You'll be able to, via the digital paintbrush, indicate different body parts and stylings on your sketch. Google provides a very detailed list of parts for your sketch. This means you can go paint with a brush as broad "head" or something as granular like "foot bottom." When you click transform, the tool will read all these colors and build an appropriate render — you can see this in the main image at the start of the article.
You'd naturally need to have some artistic skill to make the best use of a tool like this. Indeed, Google is pushing it as a demo-application, a proof of concept that'll help video-game creators be more imaginative in their creation.
Or, as Google's Andeep Singh Toor said:
It is our hope that these GAN models and the Chimera Painter demonstration tool might inspire others to think differently about their art pipeline. What can one create when using machine learning as a paintbrush?
You can try the tool for yourself here. It's possible to either draw one yourself on the web, or create a detailed outline in an app like Photoshop, and then uploading it to the Chimera Painter app to generate your creature. If you're interested in learning more, Google has a fuller explanation of the technical work that went into in building this. Artist or not, you never know what you could create.
