I have been playing with Runchat Ai (they have a rhino plugin available thru package manger) rendering today.
fed it screen shots of some old rhino models and got these images within 10 min of opening it and poking buttons. Zero training, zero tutorials… I am impressed to say the least.
the input was screenshots in rendered mode.
They look quite cool.
But the fact you spent ten minutes clicking buttons makes the entire effort leaving me cold.
Perhaps this affirms to me that understanding the effort behind a render makes a big difference to my ability to appreciate the art. This is a perfect example of why I miss proper forums with WIP threads 100 pages long. 
no snark intended, serious question…
how is that different than clicking buttons for several days to get the same effects in vray or keyshot, then photoshop, or other editing tools to get a similar image?
this to me, since it’s all my work, my model and all my prompting, editing and input, feels to me just like a better faster render engine to get a cool image I had in my head out in the world..
I was pretty resistant to this stuff for a long time, but this particular process is changing my attitude towards what I can use it for.
I think it is partially a case of mindset, and mine is probably too old (and even more so for my relatively young age).
I first got into 3D modelling when I was 11 years old, and started with Anim8or (due to Star Trek). The question that was always on my mind was about the artist, rather than a lot of the art.
It was always for me “how did they do that?!“, “I need to learn from this person“. Over the years, I made so many great contacts and friends through wanting to learn, and not only that, through returning what I learned where I can.
Taking away the layer of needing to understand to me takes away a fundamental part of the human need to learn and interact, which for me is quite a challenge to begin with. Using bella, for example, has taught me a lot not just about rendering, but about hardware, how it works, and why it matters. I know others may not care, but I like these curious things you learn along the way.
The beauty of a lot of the art online is some of it is amazing, and some of it isn’t. There are people starting, peaking, and ending thier artistic journeys; with all sorts of interesting things between. There are oppertunities to learn, to help, and to talk.
AI is making everything “look amazing” by default, by aggregating everyones ideas into a statistically averaged blob.
The coolest thing I saw on a Sci-Fi art group recently wasn’t some RTX AI-averaged amazing, nebula-infused graphical masterpiece; it was someone starting out. In today’s world of never posting anything until its 110% perfect (guilty!) or AI enhanced/created, it was really refreshing to see someone starting out anew, wanting to learn something; rather than just getting ChatGPT to solve it for them.
There’s a lot of great AI art out there… but I just don’t care about it. I can’t care about it.
For example… if you had done that scene using Cycles, I would be asking “Oh! How did you make that rain?“, as it would be genuinely interesting. The process leads to people… communicating, spending time getting to understand eachother. Now I just think “That’s great“, and then immediately stop caring about anything else that person has possibly done with the image.
I’m too stodgy and stuck in my ways, I think. I want AI to help solve exotic disease and technical problems I have at work, not “solve“ arts. 
I get it. And I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong.
All I know is this last go round for me was a bit of an eye opener and felt like a new render engine with faster better results than I could get before.
I figure for me, the horse is out the barn already, might as well ride it as opposed to getting run over by it.
There is a certain part of me that wonders what it would do with my starship images, but I have no interest in creating accounts.
Also, I think I am almost certainly wrong. Fortunately, I only do this as a hobby, or I would be unemployed in a few years.
I think AI certainly has a place, until it turns into the subscription slave hellscape that traditional renderers have, or otherwise becomes inaccessible without providing your inside leg measurement.
dammit… that made me spit coffee on my keyboard… 
I think AI certainly has a place, until it turns into the subscription slave hellscape that traditional renderers have, or otherwise becomes inaccessible without providing your inside leg measurement.
It will end exactly like this: every AI service will become a subscription. After all, why should a multinational company give you a product for free? The CEO still has to pay for his seaside villa, his jet, and his parties.
I agree. I used to love digital art. Now I just assume it’s AI and barely notice it anymore. Even though I use AI tools I think I prefer the universe where we don’t develop these tools and instead it’s still humans doing all the work. At least then we had cool things to discuss…I have zero interest in what other people prompted their AI tools to do.
I would trade for that universe without hesitation
You can count me out for a multitude of reasons beyond the “creative” uses.
First and foremost the negative impact AI is and will continue to have on the environment , resources and society in general. Right now its the shiny new toy that speeds things up or allows someone who doesn’t have the skill or the drive to learn a skill to produce something…..creative? Sure it has its benefits to science and medicine I wont debate that. But when data centers are popping up in larger swaths of land than housing and water is being diverted from people to cooling data centers and power costs are going up due to the power drain of those same data centers I have to wonder if the cost is worth spitting out some images a little faster worth it all.
My second reason is what we loose as a society when people stop learning a trade or skill because well “AI can do it for me”. Beyond the loss of satisfaction of knowing you learned a skill and created something with that skill we loose the ability to grow and innovate. The US has long since fallen into a state of consumerism and outsourcing of labor to the point we are no longer on the leading edge of development. That is happening in other countries and we are being left behind. AI will only accelerate this process. Reading comprehension and spelling are at all time lows among the younger generations.
My third reason is that the AI bubble collapse. Will it happen? Hard to say but its not looking good right now. There are dozens of economists and historians sounding the alarm on AI collapsing the economy and its not hyperbole. Ask where these AI companies get their funding? It comes from other big tech companies investing millions if not billions. The AI companies then turn around and purchase equipment from those same companies using their money. Each time racking up a larger debt. Open AI claims they wont see a profit until 2030. 95% of investors to date have not seen a return on their investment. What happens when AI has become so woven into everything we do that it becomes like the banking industry, too big to fail . And then we are left bailing them out while the CEOs relax on their islands or in their bunkers.
From Forbes : “Bain’s report finds that by 2030, tech companies will need to find $2 trillion in new AI revenue to make a profit on the cost of deployment–but estimates that they’ll be about $800 billion short. What does that mean for the economy as a whole? That’s an important question. A research note from Deutsche Bank from earlier this week suggests that without spending on the infrastructure for AI, the U.S. economy would likely be in a recession right now. And if companies can’t find the revenue they need to keep spending that money, it could have ripple effects well beyond Silicon Valley.”
So for me it doesn’t matter if you use your own models and feed those to AI . If you are using the system you are supporting that system. The question one has to ask is it worth the impact. What will we really gain in the end. How long will it be before AI makes using Rhino obsolete and now all of those people are out of a job. My industry is already under threat and work is at an all time low for many reasons but AI will only make things worse.
Im sure there will be many who disagree with me and thats fine. We are all entitled to our opinions. I will continue to do things “the old fashioned way” because I enjoy it and because I want to be able to say I did the work not AI.
Sweden is a perfect example of what’s coming when it dies down like with the electrification craze of the car fleet and the “green steel production”
Northvolt already kicked the bucket and stegra is sounding the alarms.
The common thing these 2 have is that they produced little or close to zero in production.
in the end it’s unemployment and our pensions that take the damages
I’m just waiting for the politicians to manipulate the public into believing we live longer again therefore we get pensions at 80 years old now 
A soldier, Kyle Reese, is sent back from the future to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator. So relax, guys, in the deleted scenes, he shuts down the AI in advance… we can sleep peacefully, Skynet has already been put to bed.
Found an interesting use of ChatGPT yesterday, I needed a quick tileable texture of this and asked if it could make it for me.
And a minute later I got this:
It is not truly tileable, but it is a huge step forward. And then I asked for a normal map and got this:
Quality, scale of textures, thought behind lighting and composition. 10 minute set up aside–these renders are far below the quality that any working professional would produce and around the same quality of a videogame 20 years ago. Like what could you actually use these renders for?
Like you said, its not tileable and therefore not useable. You could easily perspective crop your source image, tile it and then use materialize to generate all the additional assets.
Sure, but for 90% of meetings with clients (who by and large are not designers but business nerds, MBA marking dweebs, or tooth sucking finance bros) this rendering alone would sell the idea or mood and I didn’t have to waste tons of time prepping for the “monkey show.”
That for me is the real power here. Once it’s sold I can then go work with the people who do actually care about the details and deliver the “final work” you know…”our people”. 
I find It also allows me to iterate with myself as a solo designer in a way that helps me explore a lot of stuff really fast. It gives me a studio mate that I can brainstorm with and develop stuff way faster and at a much higher level than I can alone. I very often find stuff along the way that I may have not found had I gone the “old way”.
like I said earlier…it’s not going away and your competitors are using it. This is like when 3d modeling came on the scene in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I got on board really early (I made my first 3d model in 1992) That very early adoption opened the door for my entire career because I had 10 years in by the time other people started dipping their toes in.
At a certain point the only way to make more money as a designer is to charge more, or work faster. I’m already about as expensive as the market will bear…so I gotta cram more into less time if I want more $. By all means give AI all the hate it deserves, but I’m sure as hell not going to get out hustled by others who are adopting early.
thoughts?
I understand your point of view. I guess I just see it as a race to the bottom while at the same time burning the world down. If given the choice to give in to AI or find another path I think I will find another path. Then again I have fewer years ahead than I do behind so Im not in this game for much longer. At the rate things are going in the film industry there may not be anything left anyway.
