Someone made a deepfake of the Avengers game with movie actor faces
And it still looks a bit weird.
When Crystal Dynamics' take on an Avengers game was first unveiled, I think it's fair to say everyone was somewhat taken aback by the characters' appearance-change from the movies. Which makes sense, as we've all become accustomed to seeing Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth plastered over our screens for several years - and so the sudden transformation was a little jarring.
But what would it look like if the game did, in fact, use the faces from the movies? Thanks to a video made by one YouTuber, we now have an idea... although things still look a bit odd.
Using deepfake technology DeepFaceLab 2.0 by IPerov, YouTuber BabyZone managed to create face models for Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemworth and Mark Ruffalo - and then plaster them over the character models in a Marvel's Avengers video.
"I used my own 192 DF model trained over 1m iterations," BabyZone explained. "The faceset for each actor was created from the Marvel's Avengers movies and then trained separately for each cutscene."
As often happens with deepfake videos, the faces do appear a little wobbly or misplaced at times, but it's still quite a funny way to imagine what the game could have looked like if Crystal Dynamics had used the movie actor faces. According to interviews with the developers, using the actors' likenesses was never even considered for the game. "We knew we wanted to make an original Avengers game and go back to the roots in the comic books," creative director Shaun Escayg told The Hollywood Reporter when previously asked about the faces. So, I guess we can only dream. Or watch this deepfake.