Category Archives: art

Alien Lizard Soldiers from Another Dimension!

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This is my first try at AI animation. I rendered it with Stable Diffusion and the Deforum plugin. I’m trying to see if I can create interesting shapes that morph from one object to another over time. There are a lot of amazing things going on in this short sequence, including a bit around 30 – 40 seconds where the objects at the bottom of the screen morph into a bizarre split screen. I love that kind of stuff.

It took about two hours to render out all the frames for this one minute video. I also rendered out six versions, changing the prompt and the render settings each time to get this one which was the best. That’s a lot of tedious rendering but I’m learning quite a bit.

 

I Made This!

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I thought I had posted this last year when I made it.  This was created with Midjourney version 3 (that’s two versions ago!)  It was another accident while I was trying to do something else.  The accidents are always the best stuff.

I almost titled this “You are what you make” but that’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

All of Us 001

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I’ve chosen this as the start of a new image series that deals with anxiety and confusion.  It’s about all those different voices inside our head that distract us from where we are, and where we’re going.

One thing that fascinates me is how the “Art Machine” understands what things look like but it doesn’t understand what the images mean.  It doesn’t understand metaphor or surrealism.  I’m hoping to get some interesting images exploring confusion and dreams.

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

White Ring

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After creating my Red Ring CGI piece and having trouble with it being quite dim, I went back and changed a few things in the original project and re-rendered with a white ring of light.  I wanted this version to be different, not in silhouette, so I added an extra light to shine on the robot as well.

The robot is actually the same color as in the Red Ring image, except that I made the surface less glossy.  I also added a robot head with one circular eye.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.21
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Art Machine

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Back in March I was playing with Bing Image Creator which I think was in beta at the time.  I was looking through those images and some of them are pretty good!  Here’s one of them.

This is art made by a machine of a machine furiously making art.

#Art I made with #BingImageCreator #AI

Is This The Life We Really Want?

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I’m still trying to make some of my CGI art look like it’s from a motion picture.  What makes something look cinematic?  Color?  Framing?  I’m still not sure.  That’s what I was experimenting with in this portrait – a real person, in a real location, in a movie…  A simple moment from a larger scene.

The setup was simple: face, hair, jacket, background.  I set the camera lens at 100mm, 16×9 aspect ratio and found a good closeup.  I messed with the depth of field quite a bit to get the background soft but not too soft (this isn’t a DSLR movie.)

The green line in this screenshot shows how the camera (on the left) is focused precisely on the nearest eye and the two planes show the narrow depth of field on the face.  The other eye is slightly out f focus.

The blue in the background is the soft blue backlight. I used only three lights, a key light on the face, the back light, and a light in the window.  (And the eyes light up too.)  No fill light.

This screenshot shows how the initial render looked before color correction. It’s quite dark which means it takes longer to render but I liked the quality of light so I went for it.  It took about five and a half hours to render the final file at 10800 x 6075.    I stopped it at 4277 samples and 92 percent convergence even though my minimum is usually 95 percent and/or 5000 samples.  It didn’t look like baking it any more would make a difference.

The whites of the eyes ended up quite dark in the render so I brightened them up in post.  The eyes are a really old product and I don’t think I updated the reflectivity on the sclera quite right to render properly in iray.

I also pulled the background completely black because I thought the muddy dark shapes distracted from the face.

This is the part of the post that I feel I really should evaluate the final result… then I decide not to say anything because I can only see the mistakes.  After a few months not looking at it, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out if I love it or hate it, but not now…

Created in DAZ Studio 4.21
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Successful Power Up

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I wasn’t trying to make comic book art but that’s what the AI gave me.  This is one of the problems with AI art right now, so much of it is arbitrary.  You can get something pretty good but if you want any sort of control, it’s a roll of the dice.  Roll that dice a lot and you may get close.  This subject of this image is close to what I wanted but the style is not.  Here’s the exact prompt:

Massive machines build a beautiful metallic woman robot in a glass tube with men around controlling the machines, In the style of a 1930s SciFi pulp magazine cover, hyper detailed

It took over a hundred tries to get something close and then I did twenty more variations of this image which all came out essentially the same.  I just picked the best variation and here it is…

#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI