New Art; Transfigure Build Preview

I’ve been producing at high efficiency lately. I’m trying to focus on the things I can control while the Steam marketplace sorts itself out. I’ve made a lot of art this month and I think I’ve really dialed in a pretty snazzy style. The drama put me back a bit and the gcon demo took some dev time but that was needed as some extra decompression.

Transfigure is looking a lot better. I genuinely like some of the art now. I am done with getting hung up on stupid shit so I am just full speed ahead. And if I can’t get something I like in an area after an hour or two, I’ll just skip it for now. 

I started alphabetically going through the art assets to match Transfigure html as part of the next stage of development to reach parity as quickly as possible.

I’m really happy with the results! I am including some examples in this post. I have a good photography model as well as characters and filter overlays to upgrade some low quality 3D renders like the bear scene on Evan's route.

As a quick note here I want to talk about art production and speed. The easiest way to describe this is getting average looking art is now a lot faster with AI than it used to be with mainly 3D renders. Art that was quite difficult to make a few years ago is now fairly easy to make. I've noticed an observation that a lot of people who don't do this stuff every day may not realize: the average is getting easier - but the pinnacle is not. 

What I mean by this is there is a common hate of AI work and the main issue aside from production ethics seems to be that people seem to think it’s too easy and doesn’t count as art. I find that to be extremely weird because the stuff I’m doing now is a lot more complex than just banging off some renders. The 3D work takes a lot of effort, lightning, scene composition, character making and textures, posing etc. I’ve never heard someone say that 3D art isn’t art. But I see people writing every day that AI art isn’t art because it’s too easy while ignoring the fact that software and automation have made difficult and time consuming tasks easier for many decades longer than most of us have been alive. 

I only mention this because I noticed some of this was taking a long time and I thought it was weird so I thought for sure some of you would be curious as well so I might as well post some thoughts. Basically I got to the point of making some of this art where I was like “I switched to AI for speed but all this is taking longer than just making renders.” It’s because I was adding more steps into the chain to push the quality as high as possible. I find myself spending a lot of time in photoshop and using a lot of different tools instead of just one main piece of software. It’s like I was peaking and regressing at the same time. 

I realize everything can’t be perfect but I wanted to know what these levels are so that I can pick the best speed / quality ratios. I think I got it figured out where I’ve divided my workflows into different categories to accomplish the most common specialized tasks. The art looks good and I've had loads of setup work over the years that is rapidly paying off. As I expected, it is very easy to advance with the html as a blueprint. Everything is coming together.

I might as well mention some details on the AI models themselves. For the main art overlay I’m using an AI model with an open commercial license and I’ve added my own models that I have created with art I’ve made and have the licenses for. However, to avoid any possible legal shenanigans and possible concerns about ethics involving various celebrity inspirations and that kind of thing, I’ve made the decision to not use any AI that has been trained on the likeness of these real people. It would be very convenient to not do it this way and I don’t see how anyone could even reasonably know without a deep dive into the model training data and not just the log, but I think its likely some of this stuff will be regulated and that it makes sense to do this ethically from the start.

I find it a bit creepy that someone can basically snap a photo and then have you as like an AI slave at home later that day. I don’t think that can be prevented without banning cameras and the internet but at the very least you shouldn’t be able to copy someone 1:1 and use them to sell commercial products or make adult content. These celeb inspired characters are interesting so I want to keep them but I’m going to change some of the names slightly. Some of their appearances will also be quite a bit different than they were presented in the html game. Some characters are inspired by various celebrities (often more than one) so their art and names will be unique. I’m also going to add a few changes here and there just so it’s very obvious that, although the characters may be inspired by various well known characters or influences, they have striking unique differences and then of course all the stories and such I wrote all fictional and not based on or tied to anything in any real person’s life. I want these to be artistic interpretations, not copies.

For example, Ariana Mucho is obviously a parody character with her appearance based partly on Ariana Grande or one of the many pop star celebs like her. In real life Ariana is super petite and is of Italian heritage. In my story she is Hispanic and has different hair and eye color. Plus I’ve changed her figure, bust size and created the unique fictional story around her. To further clarify things, in future builds she will be renamed to Ariella Mucho.

The idea in a nutshell is to take some aesthetic inspiration from real life as is commonly accepted, without doing anything weird with AI or anything that might get me sued.

Loads of characters who kind of look like Ariana are made and sold constantly but those are artists making a character inspired by her, not copying her directly. 

Caprice is another important one and an exception. I own a license for full 3D body scans of Little Caprice. I can use and replicate every mole on her body down to the tiniest detail and use that for my art. However I can’t say “this project is endorsed by LC” because that isn’t true. If I ever have a decent advertising budget I would try to get her endorsement because I think it would be funny and good advertising. 

In this latest build there is updated artwork and misc polish fixes. The next build should be way more exciting as it will unlock a bunch of the newest artwork and various stories. I want the vast majority of the html’s artwork parity done in September as well as releasing what I intended to if I wouldn’t have lost the better part of a month to the censorship drama.

Let me know what you think. Is cute Taylor cute enough? Probably not. I'll keep working on it.

Transfigure 0.0.5 Preview

https://mega.nz/file/hW4WSRZD#N98lCwSxtuEAzQRYVqT_yCxE--SNx_qxaiP5zgnINv0

Mac: https://mega.nz/file/cW4Q1YaD#C0JDF9jjB1FWeZKWBJorE-papBjVizmJcQaLnwUyBOQ