Highlights:

  • Users can upload template characters from any game to make sure their new avatars reflect the game’s look to maintain consistent designs.
  • The AI-generated game characters from Popul8 are believed to work with other design tools like Mixamo, ARKit, and Amazon Polly, as well as popular graphics engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.

Didimo Inc., a producer of digital human avatar technology, is introducing generative AI to create video game characters.

Didimo claims that with the release of Popul8, game developers now have an easy way to produce hundreds of distinctive gaming characters in a small fraction of the usual time and expense. Popul8 is a generative AI tool that expands on Didimo’s current avatar generation toolkit, reducing the time it takes to produce incredibly lifelike, 3D video game, and metaverse characters with complete control over their look.

Traditionally, creating realistic-looking characters for video games required endless hours, with painstaking attention to detail being an essential step in the design process. Designing animated and varied avatars in a matter of minutes is now possible with Popul8.

Users can upload template characters from any game to make sure their new avatars reflect the game’s look to maintain consistent designs. The appearance of each figure can then be adjusted by artists. Additionally, Popul8 supports “batch creation,” which allows creators to produce a large number of unique characters at once, each with their own random attributes, to fill out entire worlds or levels with non-playable characters.

Sean Cooper, Client Integration Lead at Didimo, said, “By streamlining the character creation process, we’re unlocking the ability for artists to create richer worlds, with character diversity, at a fraction of time and necessary technical resources.”

The AI-generated game characters from Popul8 are believed to work with other design tools like Mixamo, ARKit, and Amazon Polly, as well as popular graphics engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. Additionally, they are memory-optimized, allowing game designers to include hundreds of lifelike characters without having to sacrifice their “memory budget” or the performance of the game.

Holger Mueller, Analyst at Constellation Research Inc. reported that generating video game characters is time-demanding and tiresome. “Can you remember the days when game studios put sensors on humans to capture their motion and replicate it in video games? It was expensive and generative AI can therefore potentially disrupt the entire industry by lowering the cost. It can democratize game creation by empowering many more creators,” he added.

Veronica Orvalho, Chief Executive and Founder of Didimo, mentioned that eliminating the cumbersome task of character development is the benefit of Popul8, thereby enabling developers to emphasize on the real gameplay. “With our continuing focus to make digital spaces available to everyone by allowing more diverse, representative, authentic and personal engagement, this platform is setting the standard for positive uses of AI generation,” she added.

Colossal Order Ltd., Sony Group Corp., Atom Stars, Soleil Ltd., Ceek VR Inc., NOS Communications Inc., and such game developers are already utilizing Popul8, which can now be accessed by everyone.