Cine-AI: Generating Video Game Cutscenes in the Style of Human Directors
This addresses the challenge for game developers who lack resources or skills to create professional cutscenes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI cinematography tools.
The authors tackled the problem of costly and inconsistent AI-generated video game cutscenes by developing Cine-AI, an open-source toolset that generates cutscenes imitating human directors, with user studies showing correct director association and above-average usability.
Cutscenes form an integral part of many video games, but their creation is costly, time-consuming, and requires skills that many game developers lack. While AI has been leveraged to semi-automate cutscene production, the results typically lack the internal consistency and uniformity in style that is characteristic of professional human directors. We overcome this shortcoming with Cine-AI, an open-source procedural cinematography toolset capable of generating in-game cutscenes in the style of eminent human directors. Implemented in the popular game engine Unity, Cine-AI features a novel timeline and storyboard interface for design-time manipulation, combined with runtime cinematography automation. Via two user studies, each employing quantitative and qualitative measures, we demonstrate that Cine-AI generates cutscenes that people correctly associate with a target director, while providing above-average usability. Our director imitation dataset is publicly available, and can be extended by users and film enthusiasts.