I recently got access to the Midjourney Beta and have been having a blast experimenting with it and it's applications towards material creation.
The ability to use AI to create a Library of Grunges and iterate on outputs suitable for Bitmap to Material like workflows is an exciting prospect. To be able to create patterns, grunges and specific noise types almost instantly and iterate on them has huge implications for material authoring (I mean this is going to affect a lot of art mediums I imagine, but focusing on materials here).
Need a Traditional Japanese Inspired pattern to slap on some tiles? Generate a huge amount of ideas in minutes. Need some rust inspired grunge maps to push something forward? Again, making in minutes. Some posters, or book pages for a scene? - got em.
These are my experiments from over the weekend and I am excited in exploring more and seeing how far this goes! Almost all of the images posted are raw outputs from Midjourney.
You can sign up for their private beta here http://bit.ly/3J2NNVs