Unity ArtEngine Accelerates Model Texturing for Artists Using NVIDIA GPU-Powered AI

ArtEngine, along with the latest release of vMaterials, helps designers speed up material and texture creation for designs.
by Nicole Castro

Quality standards in design are increasing, but editing software hasn’t kept up.

Outdated software with little to no automation wastes vast amounts of content creators’ time as they must manually edit and tweak textures and materials as part of their workflows.

No longer. Unity ArtEngine, an AI-assisted solution for artists, uses NVIDIA GPUs to do the hard, time-consuming and repetitive work that helps creatives save time in their design process.

ArtEngine is developed by Artomatix, a company that won the $100,000 Early Stage Challenge at NVIDIA’s Emerging Companies Summit in 2015. Now part of Unity, Artomatix is bringing AI-assisted artistry to content creation workflows.

With NVIDIA GPU-powered AI supporting Unity ArtEngine, artists can reduce model texture time and quickly produce unique variations of textured models.

AI Drives New Processing of Textures

One of the greater challenges when creating textures for virtual materials is to make them tile seamlessly, so that the texture can cover large surface areas. Previously, this work had to be done manually — artists would take great care to tile surfaces and make sure there weren’t too many noticeable seams or patterns when the texture is repeated.

Using GPU-powered AI, ArtEngine’s material synthesis delivers a fast, flexible way to speed up the creative 3D artist toolkit without taking control away from the artist. ArtEngine introduces the Example-Based Workflow to help automate and accelerate photoconversion to physically based rendered materials, including up-resing, deblur, seam removal, unwarping, color matching and more.

This allows designers to create textures in a fraction of the time, so they can focus more on developing multiple variations of a texture and quickly delivering the best quality.

“If you could automate even 5 percent of the 3D content creation pipeline, you’d be onto something huge,” said Mike Oliver, technical art director at Crystal Dynamics. “As it stands, I feel the Artomatix Suite will go well beyond this potential. This is a game-changer.”

AI-powered seam removal for incredible tiling power.

“Speaking as a texture creator, ArtEngine truly is a godsend,” said Eduard Caliman, a 3D visualization artist. “The texture synthesis features allow me to speed up the processing of my raw scans by at least 50 percent.”

With ArtEngine, removing seams in tileable textures is just the start. Users can balance the inputs, create variations, turn a single input image into several output maps for physically based rendering, and even remove shadows from images.

New vMaterials Release Adds More Content for Creators

ArtEngine isn’t the only tool that’s helping users create materials in design and graphics.

The latest release of vMaterials, NVIDIA’s materials catalog, offers over 2,000 real-world materials — including metallic chameleon car paint, weathered concrete, clinker brick, roughly woven cotton and more. NVIDIA used ArtEngine in the creation of the vMaterial libraries and believe it can be an indispensable tool to further enhance professional artist texturing pipelines.

Unity ArtEngine is the first tool of a full suite of tools from the Artomatix organization at Unity, set to release next year.

Get a free 14-day trial of ArtEngine and learn more about the latest version of vMaterials.