Comment by mediaman

The funny thing is that Allegorithmic (now part of Adobe) was far more devastating to certain classes of game artist than stuff like this will be in its current form.

It almost totally automated vast swaths of texture generation by creating algorithmic systems that technical artists could use to create textures.

Want a brick texture? Sure, you connect some nodes and set parameters and you have great looking bricks. Want the mortar to be a little more widely spaced? Done. Want some moss on the brick? Want some chipping on the brick? Want some color variation? Done, done, done.

It probably reduced the amount of time to iterate textures by more than 100x.

Now, talented technical artists make OK money because they are good at using these tools. Photoshop jockies are gone.

LLM manipulation of Blender will be interesting but it's very, very challenging to see the path of something like Claude having nearly as big of an impact. It'll be helpful to automate some common tasks, to build internal tooling. But Allegorithmic single handedly changed the way 3D games look, because you could be so much more ambitious.

You didn't really hear about it, though, because it wasn't part of the cultural zeitgeist.