Andrew pulled out his laptop, fired up a little tiny floating bar and Maya below it. He clicked a button on the bar and said (with his voice) “Promethean, build me a bedroom”. And Maya viewport came alive with a bunch of dancing bounding boxes highlighting and shuffling in turn until a few seconds later there it was – a layout of a bedroom.

From the looks of the rest of the short demo we’ve seen (sorry no images for you so far), Promethean AI-powered world-building solution, which can either generate entire environments or any particular composition of objects. At one point Andrew said ‘add a desk’ and a table appeared and placed itself in the environment with a chair, keyboard, mouse, monitor, books, pens, paper scraps – the whole lot just from that one command.

The demo showed only the layout but Andrew assured us that materials and lighting were in the works. It’s super fast, it could be integrated into any game tech. And support for major engines is already underway.

You can talk or you can type into an intelligent command line that gives you suggestions based on both what you are trying to build and what you already have in the scene. This AI analyses a lot of different data out there, making decisions of its own. It knows that bedrooms must definitely have a bed, a nightstand and a lamp. It knows how does the bedroom look if the hero is a teenager, or if the hero is an older man. It feels a bit like magic. And by the looks of it, it’s not really procedural math that stands behind it but the human touch.

Andrew: ‘Procedural’ is definitely a dirty word that we had to deconstruct for anyone we’ve demoed : ‘Procedural’ is definitely a dirty word that we had to deconstruct for anyone we’ve demoed Promethean to. There is very little procedural about it. It’s trained and informed by real art built by real people. It learns from every individual person who works with it and caters it’s generation to their personal taste. There are no knobs, no code, no sliders, no numbers to tweak – you show it what you want, you train it and you correct it when it’s wrong so that it can do better in the future. It’s all about you – the Artist, and your artistic process is the input and the main mode of interaction. You don’t have to adapt to it, you don’t need to learn it – it’s 2018, your software can learn You.

As you might have guessed, the key question that we had was whether this AI can eventually replace artists altogether? Maximov believes, that Promethean is not a harmful job killer, but rather a new tool, which unlike the majority of programs in your pipeline, is based on celebrating artistic decisions rather than numbers and lists. With the core prototype of the environment done in a second, you’ll have the whole day for tweaking, art directing and figuring out the final look.

Andrew: “The main goal behind Promethean is to take the creative intent in your head and turn it into actionable 3d content without all the manual hassle. You have a creative solution in your head – you want to see it materialize as fast as possible. That’s what we do. We want to put your brain into a mech suit so that it can go much further much faster.

We are not looking to give you an environment that is 100% done to your taste out of the gate with 3 words of input – that is not our purpose. What we want to do is to take you 70% there as fast as possible so that you as an artist can experiment, iterate and make an informed decision on where your time is best spent.

Polish makes great games but being able to apply it everywhere it really counts is a luxury almost no developers have.”