Toward Real-Time G-Buffer-Guided Style Transfer in Computer Games

Artistic neural style transfer (NST) has achieved remarkable success for images. However, this is not the case for dynamic 3-D environments, such as computer games, where temporal coherence remains a challenge. Our article presents an approach that uses the G-buffer information available in a game pipeline to generate robust and temporally consistent in-game artistic stylizations based on a style reference image. We use a synthetic dataset created from open-source computer games and demonstrate that the utilization of depth, normals, and edge information enables the stylization process to be more aware of the geometric and semantic aspects of a game scene. The proposed approach builds on the previous work by injecting style transfer in the rendering pipeline while also utilizing G-buffer information during inference time to improve upon the stability of the stylizations, offering a controllable way to stylize computer games in terms of temporal coherence and content preservation. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our in-game stylization network demonstrate significantly higher temporal stability compared to existing style transfer approaches when stylizing 3-D computer games.