u/Wild-Chard

I just wanted to espouse my new favorite medium. If you're a concept artist, coming from digital art, or are just wanting an alternative to gouache, I'd highly recommend trying casein paint.

Back in the Rockwell days, casein actually used to be one of the, if not *the* most popular paint for illustrators. It even competes with oil paint in finish/handling (see John Berkey's portfolio for examples). It lays down like gouache - you can do washes or opaque passages. You have a window to scrub/rework the paint if needed. Unlike gouache, you can glaze and layer with ease. After around a couple days, casein will cure and be even stronger than many oil paintings.

I started with oil, then went to gouache. When I eventually left digital art behind and decided to go all traditional, it's very frustrating to lay down my large studio paintings with gouache. Casein pretty much solved all those problems for me, and it's extremely cheap in comparison.

If you've heard of casein, I'd definitely go try it. I always thought it was some weird boutique medium until I actually started using it.

If someone handed you a folder containing ten images, and told you nine were AI-generated - how many people would even bother opening the folder?

Artwork made on a computer is often valued based on scarcity and authenticity. Unless a creator is already known and trusted, what makes the artwork scarce is often how much effort it took to make it. If AI is culturally normalized, people will likely assume everything is made by AI (perhaps even without a prompter), and thus it's effort is near-zero. If AI is never normalized, people might just stop looking. Eventually, it seems likely even well-known artists will lose status.

The inevitable consequence, for the majority of both AI users and human artists who wish to remain relevant, seems to be to either:

A. Go back to traditional/physical forms of media, where a verifiable original is produced, or -
B. Create larger projects where the authenticity of individual assets is less important.

I've been a digital concept artist for 10 years. I've gone from being a professional, to doing digital art for free for my audience, to going full traditional art (paint and brushes). I don't think traditional art is absolutely immune from devaluation, but I'm not willing to do nothing. I've also started a game project from the IP I've curated over the past decade. I feel like doing anything less would be trying to bail out the Titanic with a plastic bucket.

This is simply a conclusion I've come to after almost 5 years of trying to find an answer. How have other people reconciled this - AI users? Other artists?

The way I usually illustrate my concern is this: if you had a folder full of 10 images, and everyone knew 9 out of 10 were fake... who would take the time open it to begin with? I think the internet is the same way. Now that there are so many "good enough" illustrations being pumped out, and many are AI generated - how long before people are too exhausted to continue engaging with it entirely? Can non-artists even tell anymore?

A solution could be to simply have tighter-knit art followings, where art consumers trust each artist personally. But it's hard for me to believe that people who are already exhausted will put in even more work to vet every single new artist they come across. Instead, I think people are more likely to turn to things that don't depend on a single asset, like games or animation.

I've pretty much taken this to heart by now. I've built up a following from doing digital art for 10 years, but even I recently switched to traditional. I'm still not sure that makes me immune from this trend. I've also started a game from my IP, trying to build "upwards" and make something more interactive. I always second guess myself, even though I love painting. I've already had friends and even strangers mention their fatigue with AI and how it's affected their commissions or trust.

This isn't to say people will stop making digital art, but that artists making standalone 2D images might be stuck as custodians of an outdated craft whose cultural and commercial relevance has greatly diminished.

Has anyone else been thinking about this?

I've been using casein paint lately (making my own), and I've noticed that it solves a lot of the frustrations I was having with the reactivation and value-shifting properties that are common with gouache - especially being able to darken whole passages with transparent washes without blending.

If you have casein medium, you can actually use it as a separate medium for gouache (similar to oil/acrylic workflows) and you get a lot of the desirable properties of casein while still using gouache.

Has anyone else had this experience? I've noticed casein is extremely niche these days. Is there a subreddit for it, or should it be assimilated here under r/gouache?

Hey there. I'm currently working on a pretty large game dev pipeline, with (currently) two separate Unreal projects for two systems which I am working on at different times. I'd like to unify this system safely, but I'm unsure how to navigate this.

For context on my end - one of these two systems is a massive project for generating city environments, and I've been slowly refining the assets and generation code as I go. The other project is a parkour system, which isn't very asset-heavy but still contains a lot of scripts and logic files that're thrown around. Both of these projects have a ton of fragile project-specific dependencies.

My question here is: how do game devs usually combine/add to huge projects like this, which will inevitably throw tons of unsorted dependency files into /content/ (the root folder), while still keeping proper version control?

I'm familiar with git as a dev, but with some of these game projects being over 100gb of raw asset data, I'm unsure how branching or version control would actually work. I'd like to safely experiment without going through the pain of saving giant version dumps manually every time something major changes.