With a background in industrial design, a good portfolio and some luck, you could land a job as a digital set designer for Hollywood. Their job involves, among other things, rendering cityscapes through which green-screened actors might run, fly or have car chases. But while the actors won't be replaced by computers yet, the days of designers specializing in cityscapes might be numbered.
That's because researchers at NVIDIA have managed to harness the power of AI to render not just single scenes, but entire urban environments, and everything you might expect to see in one:
"This is the first time we can do this with a neural network," said Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Deep Learning at NVIDIA. "Neural networks – specifically – generative models are going to change the way graphics are created.
"One of the main obstacles developers face when creating virtual worlds, whether for game development, telepresence, or other applications is that creating the content is expensive. This method allows artists and developers to create at a much lower cost, by using AI that learns from the real world."
You can learn more about the technology here.