Unity has announced the launch of two AI tools aimed at transforming the creative process in gaming and real-time 3D applications: Unity Muse and Unity Sentis. Unity Muse is designed to speed up the creation process in the Unity Editor through natural input mechanisms such as text prompts and sketches. A key feature, Muse Chat, is currently in closed beta. This functionality enables users to access Unity documentation, training resources, and support content swiftly and accurately. Unity Muse will gradually offer more features, such as creating textures, sprites, and character animation.
Unity Sentis is an AI solution that facilitates the integration of neural networks into the Unity Runtime. Sentis, now in its closed beta phase, permits AI models to operate across different platforms where Unity functions, including mobile, PC, web, and popular game consoles such as Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation. This eliminates the need for cloud-based model hosting, reducing related complications, latency, and cost.
Unity is also introducing AI Verified Solutions to the Unity Asset Store, consisting of third-party packages that comply with Unity’s quality and compatibility standards. These solutions aim to boost the creative process, offering features like AI-powered smart NPCs, AI-produced VFX, textures, 2D sprites and 3D models, generative speech, and in-game testing with AI.
The company is encouraging user feedback on these new AI tools and their closed beta versions. It is also offering the Unity AI Beta Program for interested parties to keep updated about these AI offerings.
Find out more on the Unity Blog.
This is cool, but keep in mind that publishing games to Steam with AI generated assets could be risky :
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/valve-responds-to-claims-it-has-banned-ai-generated-games-from-steam/
While true, as with all AI generated content in graphics work will need to have royalty free/cc0 license types to be legal in any commercial work. As stated in that article:
“As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game,”
We have access to the API of some of these AI engines so you can actually train it on all the IP you own, so technically if you had a large enough database for it to read from or legally obtain then you could train the AI yourself using your content.