NVIDIA RTX Remix and AI Instruments Remodel Basic Recreation Modding at Scale

A small modding staff has demonstrated how generative AI can compress years of texture work into weeks, rebuilding the 2004 shooter Painkiller with path-traced visuals throughout 35 ranges utilizing NVIDIA’s RTX Remix toolkit and customized AI fashions.

The venture showcases a manufacturing pipeline that processed 1000’s of legacy textures into fashionable Bodily Based mostly Rendering supplies—work that will have been unattainable for a small staff utilizing conventional strategies.

AI Handles 80% of the Grind

McGillacutty, the venture’s atmosphere and materials lead, places it bluntly: manually rebuilding 1000’s of supplies throughout 35 ranges with minimal texture reuse wasn’t taking place. Enter PBRFusion, an open-source mannequin created by staff member NightRaven particularly for RTX Remix workflows.

The mannequin batch-generates base coloration, regular, roughness, and peak maps from legacy textures. Quinn Baddams, staff lead and founding father of Merry Pencil Studios, estimates AI automation eradicated roughly 80% of repetitive work, releasing the staff to give attention to the 20% requiring creative judgment.

“PBRFusion was all the time meant to be a software, not a drop-in substitute,” NightRaven explains. The mannequin went via three main iterations and over 1,000 hours of growth earlier than reaching the model utilized in manufacturing.

The place AI Falls Brief

The staff discovered clear limits to automation. Metallic supplies have been largely hand-crafted. Glass, clear surfaces, and pores and skin required customized values and maps—significantly for subsurface scattering results. Texture atlases, the place single photographs include a number of unrelated surfaces, confused the AI fashions completely.

Roughness maps proved particularly difficult. “AI-generated roughness typically requires adjustment to realize bodily correct outcomes,” Baddams notes. “Appropriate values could be very particular.” The staff cross-referenced real-world PBR supplies to validate their outputs.

Hero supplies obtained extra remedy utilizing CC0 PBR mixing, procedural workflows in InstaMAT Studio, and handbook portray. The hybrid method—AI baseline plus human refinement—turned their commonplace working process.

Path Tracing Exposes Every part

Full-scene path tracing essentially modified the fabric workflow. Properties like roughness, reflectivity, and wetness turned much more seen than conventional rendering ever revealed. The unique recreation’s baked shadows, which added distinction in 2004, now created bodily unattainable lighting responses.

The answer: strip baked lighting from supply textures, then reintroduce distinction via roughness variation, stronger regular maps, and managed self-shadowing. RTX Pores and skin expertise enabled subsurface scattering on characters—mild genuinely scattering via surfaces relatively than easy spotlight methods.

“To my information, this stage of ray-traced subsurface scattering hasn’t been out there to recreation builders in a sensible, real-time method,” Baddams says. “It was beforehand restricted to offline rendering.”

Implications for the Trade

The venture arrives because the broader Painkiller franchise sees renewed exercise. 3D Realms introduced a contemporary reimagining in March 2025, concentrating on an October 2025 launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Collection, and PC. The timing creates an fascinating parallel: official studio assets versus small-team AI-augmented workflows attaining comparable visible ambitions.

For builders contemplating comparable approaches, the staff recommends beginning small—seize a single scene, apply primary PBR supplies, iterate with path tracing to grasp material-light relationships earlier than scaling up.

NightRaven is already ending the following PBRFusion model. NVIDIA will showcase associated RTX neural rendering advances at GDC, the place VP John Spitzer will current path tracing and generative AI workflow improvements. The tooling hole between AAA studios and indie groups continues narrowing.

Picture supply: Shutterstock