Super simple virtual monster creation tool made by Google

Chimera Painter , developed by Google, is a tool that allows you to create virtual monsters with realistic textures just by drawing monsters with different colored lines for each body part.

Creating virtual monsters that appear in games and places requires artistic creativity and skills to express images. Artists with this ability create monsters full of creativity while chasing the deadline to create various monsters that appear in the game world, so gamers can enjoy fierce battles in the virtual world.

It is Chimera Painter that such an artist devised as a tool to help create monsters. Chimera Painter is a machine learning model created using hostile generation network GANs trained using hundreds of thousands of monster images created with 3D models.

Chimera Painter uses GANs that pair two convolutional neural networks with each other. The convolutional neural network is a generator network that generates a new image and the other is a disk limiter network that determines whether it is a sample from the generated image training data set. When creating a creature generator using GANs, it is necessary to accurately print out areas with low contrast in the image that have a problem. The part that cannot accurately output the low-contrast part is also important to human perception, so a method was needed to solve this.

To solve this problem, Google has adopted an artist-centered semi-automatic approach. In this method, you first create a monster using a 3D model through an artist. At this time, the monster asks you to create it for each type, such as lions and hyenas. The created model is then superimposed on textures using Unreal Engine, and one is output as a subdivision map in which different colors are arranged for each body part and one actual color image.

In this way, we succeeded in preparing hundreds of thousands of color monster images and segmented map sets created from 3D CG models. By learning a machine learning model using a dataset consisting of color images and subdivision maps, the model can correctly recognize and output monster body parts.

In fact, Chimera Painter can automatically create a monster image with a realistic texture just by classifying and drawing the monster head, mouth, wings, and tail. Related information can be found here .