Discussion Unity and BariumAI (Text to PBR Material Generator)

I stumbled on this tool, which apparently has been acquired by Unity..

https://barium.ai



It's only got "Log in"!

Does anybody know anything about this ?

 

There was barely anything about it even before the acquisition, so probably not.

 

https://80.lv/articles/a-new-ai-powered-service-for-generating-textures-and-maps/

 

Hmm, one would only need to combine this:
https://github.com/dobrado76/Stable-Diffusion-Unity-Integration
With this: https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/ (https://github.com/BoundingBoxSoftware/Materialize)
And could get quite close to what Barium promises!

Both GPL though, so no monetization.

As for Unity: Fear soon after this acquisition was when they let 2.5-5% of their people go and supposedly many of them where in the AI field due to some other (engine unrelated) project there having failed :/ Possibly this was a collateral casualty.
On the other hand, the vid is just a couple months old.

 

@Antypodish thanks - I did use search engines prior to my post and went through most of what's around, but am hoping @Murgilod is eventually wrong and that someone [who hasn't signed an NDA] might see this thread who knows about the acquisition itself and/or future plans for us to get our hands on it (as a paid thing, or by it being turned into a free editor window for everyone *dreams..* ..another great reason for people to switch to Unity!).. I searched the forum thoroughly as well before posting, searching for bariumai, barium.ai, even just "barium" alone had 0 results.

What actually led to my discovery of it was briefly trying some AI prompts to generate tileable/seamless results (as a curiosity, not urgent need), and kept failing miserably at my attempts (so either I don't know "how to ask properly", or prompting AI for that needs an additional layer of code).. because while I could prompt specifically enough for an exactly top down view and get very close - a useful idea if combined with offset and clone stamping in image editor - an automatically tiling/seamless result remained just beyond my grasp.

Anyway, I found this and thought like wow, this is exactly what I was looking for (and it has the bonus of returning a ready-to-use material without also having to then generate and tweak other maps).. but then slid into a momentary depression once realizing we actually couldn't access it *at all* now because Unity bought it. Like, of all the companies that could have bought it up, that was truly exciting to see, ..but now it's so close yet feels so far, not even 1 announcement here about it being acquired.

This is the first personally-relevant/useful thing Unity has bought since 2019. I would upgrade from Personal right now to Plus if that meant having access to this (well, and because I feel sort of guilty having used the engine for free for so long).. but anything offered requiring Pro license isn't affordable for me (at least any time soon that I can imagine), so if that's the plan, even if released soon, this tool has effectively been buried for hobbyists. I mean, as a service on the web which would probably have ended up with an API if it didn't have one already, you could just create your own in-editor window if you wanted to. Now the service is gone entirely.

So.. with no announcement by Unity what they're doing, it's frustrating. Of course, frustrated long enough, if people have the need they will find other way, then it will never matter if it's released or not, so hopefully it's not rendered obsolete by Unity waiting too long and then they bought it for nothing

 

Hello there, I was actually the artist that did all of the promotional art for us in the early days. I did several renders on the site, including all of the cycling icospheres, as well as 2 of the banners. I can send them here to prove my validity.

Barium AI was made based off of stable diffusion, as well as several algorithms we developed in house it allowed you to fill in 4 criteria spots in order to generate seamless textures up to 8k resolution squared. These materials included the following passes: Color, AO, Normal, transmission, roughness, specular, metallic, and emission maps.

Our project was acquired very early on by Unity once news of our success broke. All I can disclose is that Barium Ai is now one of the core components in Unity's new tool suite, which has yet to be fully released

It seems as though I can only upload 5 of the 14 total images I made for this project, so I hope this suffices.

As for any additional information, I was sadly not taken up with the project, as I hadn't contributed to the tool itself, but rather extensive beta testing hand in hand with our lead developer. All I know is it was a fun project made by an amazing pal of mine that I am proud to have been a part of.

Hope this answers any questions as to what happened/why barium's old site is no longer active!

 

New Tool Suite by Unity and usage of Stable Diffusion?
Sounds very interesting (as long as it's not a premium only tool suite >w<')!

 

I decided to reply one more time with screenshots of Barium itself, for anybody interested in how it worked. I had most of my materials cleared from some small hiccups, but I tested extensive prompts for our developers. My account is still active, however I sadly cannot use the tool anymore, only access my account and the generations I did.

We were working on additions such as 2D tile sets for platformers, as well as isometric tiles for other use cases.

On top of that, we were working on a fork that could produce low resolution pixelated textures with limited bit depth visuals (effectively pixel art lol)

Hope this gives you all a bit of an insight into what it was like, and the results we got. You can seven see some of the materials I generated for promotional renders, as well as my "subscribed" account, which had highest access and included access to 8k generations, some beta features, and priority generations on our fastest server instance.

 

Unity themselves made the announcement on twitter! https://twitter.com/unitygames/status/1638510865069531138?cxt=HHwWhICzkeu8lL0tAAAA

Barium AI is proud to be part of this new AI suite coming to Unity! I wish I had more to share, but as I said, i wasn't taken with the team haha

I would like to think its an AI that can run locally on your computer, as most game developers tend to have higher end PC's, but I am not too sure at this moment. No info on if its a free addition, or a service one pays for. All I know is I worked on the very beginning of it and I am HYPED for the future of AI (I am actually working on an open source data set for stable diffusion that uses work for 0 copyrighted sources, as well as pays for images from artists and community members in hopes to liberate AI from the stigma of "stolen" data)

 

I followed the Unity AI Beta signup link provided in the twitter announcement mentioned above (which was posted on March 22nd, 2023). From the info there, it sounds like it will be for all of us!

"Unity is building an open and unique AI ecosystem that will put AI-powered game-development tools in the hands of millions of creators."

Thank you @Sytan for the additional information - it is greatly appreciated.

 

Is Keijiro working with this?

https://github.com/keijiro/AICommand
https://github.com/keijiro/UnityMLStableDiffusion

My guess is he wrote up his own implementation. Very cool, but I wonder how useful this would actually be in the Editor. It's a bit of a back and forth to get results using ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. Not sure I would want a bot to be messing with my entire scene only to see that it got something wrong.