Watch: How to Upscale Second Life Machinima with AI Program Stable Diffusion

Problem: Machinima is an amazing use case for metaverse platforms, enabling people to create high quality narrative videos on a low budget — if only, that is, the "high quality" part wasn't so challenging. Because any time you capture video in a multiplayer virtual world, you inevitably encounter lag, frame rate drop, and onscreen mesh files that don't fully display. That problem is especially acute with Second Life, where everything in the virtual world (including other people's avatars, logging in from around the world) is streamed to the machinima maker's computer in real time.

Solution: Generative AI! Specifically Stable Diffusion from Stability AI.

Watch this tutorial from Pryda Parx (above) to see what I mean. Using Stable Diffusion and Comfy UI (a graphic user interface for Stable Diffusion), Parx is able to convert footage captured from Second Life with a low frame rate and poor image quality into something approaching professional quality — upscaling it from 15 frames per second  to 60 FPS with a 4K display.

Parx tells me the conversion process is not especially difficult:

"If it goes well its not much more than running a few commands from the command line window," as Parx puts it. It should also work for enhancing machinima captured in any virtual world/MMO/metaverse platform.

The whole process is explained step by step in her tutorial, though as with any program in the wild, exercise caution. I've always been excited by the potential of Second Life machinima, but the difficulty of creating pro-grade material "in camera" is pretty much impossible. So much so, that the best SL machinima is shot in front of a virtual green screen and heavily post-processed.  

By contrast, this tutorial illustrates a meaningful, powerful use case for generative AI in a way that enhances human creativity in the Metaverse.

Read More: nwn.blogs.com