I'm playing with AI art for characters from the books
Added 2022-10-07 19:14:52 +0000 UTCThese things are getting good. Really, scary, good once you know how to feed the right prompts and sketches into the image generation model. I wanted to share some of my better renders with you guys. (Read the captions for character names.)
Quite a few are actually colorations of sketches I had done by human artists and then rejected before finalizing a cover, so you can see the cover art that could have been if I had chosen differently.
There are a few problems in some of them so you can tell they're AI, but I got really lucky with a few of them. I would like to pay a real artist to clean them up for me, but I'm afraid to use my regular people lest they be offended I'm using AI stuff. But realistically, I never would be able to afford to commission this much art conventionally.
I think some of them came out pretty good, and this could be a good way to reliably generate character images to fuel our imagination while reading (or writing, in my case.)
Let me know if you guys think this is worth doing once a week or so. It's fun and I have mountains of sketches to render. I could even run some of my own sketches if we were really, really desperate to see something rendered.
It does make me a bit scared for the future of creative work. I have seen all the GPT-3 writing AI's. To be honest, I thought it was going to take a decade more to get to this point with art. I guess I better brush up on my other skills in case Amazon decides to replace me with a robot in a few years!
Anyway, tell me if you want more, and I will oblige!
Comments
Excellent, to all… but not quite for covers. Like the between chapter. Idea though.
Worlok
2022-10-07 23:51:12 +0000 UTCOh for sure!
Iron Akela
2022-10-07 21:02:49 +0000 UTCI’m just paying to use NovelAI’s curated anime model, but I do have the waifu diffusion data on my PC somewhere if you want that. It will give you more anime-themed results, but it works. For these I used both written and image prompts at the same time.
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:55:43 +0000 UTCI think I vaguely remember something about Regina being part japanese, though I wasn't sure since it's been a while. But yeah, she looks good. Could use that as a cover, no problem.
DiabolicalGenius
2022-10-07 20:50:21 +0000 UTCwhere did you get your training data? did you just wrote prompts for the algorithm to learn?
João Pereira
2022-10-07 20:47:17 +0000 UTCAll of the prompts were different, but try something like “warrior woman, dynamic pose, beautiful shading, cinematic lighting, drawn by artgerm” and you should get something in a similar style, depending on what the training data your model was made with.
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:42:38 +0000 UTCWhat are the writing prompts you are using? im setting up a stable diffusion fork on my pc and want some pointers
João Pereira
2022-10-07 20:39:59 +0000 UTCShe was always a little Japanese. Now more so. I remember people thought her name was ugly last time, so I changed it. Might change Sarah too, since I don’t want two ‘S’ names in the main cast. But yeah, Morgana turned out way more badass than she did in the actual drawn art I had made of her. Weird, since that was what I gave the AI to work with.
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:38:10 +0000 UTCThey are surprisingly good. I especially like the Regina/Sakura (is she part japanese now?) one. That looks amazing. The Morgana one looks cool too, though a bit out of character. Too badass to be our klepto minx maybe?
DiabolicalGenius
2022-10-07 20:26:01 +0000 UTCI thought they were birds until I was uploading and took a closer look.
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:24:05 +0000 UTCWith the white body and yellow nose on them, I thought they were birds. Didn't realise they were aircraft until I read your post. Weird.
DiabolicalGenius
2022-10-07 20:22:39 +0000 UTCNobody mentioned giant Asuriel, with tiny airplanes flying all around her yet. I had a good laugh when that popped up. Why are there airplanes? 😂
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:08:09 +0000 UTCI don’t plan to use AI art at all in books until the copyright ownership/legality of it is decided in a court case. This will be strictly for patreon. If I make something I really like and want in the books, I will find a human artist, have them redraw the image by hand, then have them sign paperwork documenting the transfer of copyright ownership.
Marvin
2022-10-07 20:05:21 +0000 UTCHmm, perhaps not as covers but as mid-book artwork? I've been reading some other books from different authors and I was surprised that two (I think?) of them put up sketches between chapters showing how some minor/new characters look like. And I must say I quite enjoyed it. Those characters, while not as proeminent as the main crew to get their own covers, were important enough that they deserved a little "recognition". And, to be fair, it doesn't really need to be minor characters. Just putting the MC and/or existing companions in a new enviroment/clothes/pose (like you have with the Illiel and Sasha one) would be pretty cool.
Don Deverald
2022-10-07 19:57:11 +0000 UTCI take it that's a vote for doing more?
Marvin
2022-10-07 19:25:29 +0000 UTCLoved those!!!
Iron Akela
2022-10-07 19:24:10 +0000 UTCThanks for the reference!
Marvin
2022-10-07 19:22:25 +0000 UTCI started with Midjourney and Dall-E 2, but have since moved to NovelAI and their curated anime image model. As I understand it, they’re just running stable diffusion, which you can run on any gaming PC. Their training data is way better than whatever I found on the web though, at least for this art style.
Marvin
2022-10-07 19:21:51 +0000 UTCMY friends son does coloring and stuff for comic books. He could help you. You can see some of his work on his Facebook page. here: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.brown.7355 Tell him Warren St. James pointed you his way if you are interested.
Warren James
2022-10-07 19:21:09 +0000 UTCWhat program did you use for these?
CUI13
2022-10-07 19:17:15 +0000 UTC
