Epic Games recently courted controversy by using AI-generated images to promote a brand crossover with Porsche, with the former claiming that the clearly generated concept image came from the car manufacturer and doesn't reflect the final product.
Now, the company is openly more unapologetic about its use of the technology. In a recent video released on the Unreal Engine channel, two Epic artists outline Fortnite's "concepting process."
The process begins with an artist drawing a character from scratch (hurray!), which remains the coolest part. The artist then uses something called "GenMedia Bridge" to prompt a limited language model (LLM) to tweak the character's rendering.
By the narrator's own admission, the process added details to the art that were unasked for, such as a skull on the exterior of the character's pouch and an excessive number of belt buckles. The artist then had to manually remove these additions.
The pair then move on to environmental concepts, specifically a project where the artist is designing the outside of a store called the Yarn Barn. The artist creates the store in Blender, sliding assets into place to assemble the building.
Another piece of generative technology, Nano Banana, is used on the resulting...
