Tag Archives: cyborg

Synthetic Happiness

I was looking back at all the images I rendered with Midjourney over the last year and a half.  There’s some good stuff in there that got overlooked.  I actually rendered this last year (2022) with Midjourney version 3.

I could have opted to crop this square and make it all about the figure, but that is so boring and just like every other image on the internet.  This composition reminds me of art you would see on a gatefold vinyl LP double album from back in the day, with the front cover on the right and the back on the left, and the art continuously wrapping around.

#Art I made with #Midjourney V3 #AI

 

Robot Romantic Getaway Goes Wrong

It’s not easy getting the art machine to do what you want. It’s like it has a mind of its own…

I’m trying to create a video with Stable Diffusion and Deforum.  Doing lots of experiments.  It’s becoming more and more clear that storytelling is next to impossible because there are just too many variables with AI art.  The machine is constantly throwing curve balls that derail the story.  The scene above was originally part of a Spaceship Hibernation story line.  It went something like this:

EXT. SPACE spaceship, stars, perhaps a nebula
INT. SHIP Wide shot, pipes, hibernation chambers
CU. Woman sleeping in a hibernation chamber
EXT. EARTH sunset, beautiful, idyllic
EXT. EARTH Woman and Man holding hands
EXT. EARTH sunset, man and woman kissing in love, sunset
EXT. SPACE spaceship flys into the distance

All kinds of things happened.  I couldn’t get the machine to give me a single spaceship in outer space.  At first there was a robot standing on the ground.  I tried a slew of negative prompts but always ended up with a fleet of ships, or planets, or no spaceship.

Also, the girl sleeping in the hibernation chamber always had her eyes opened.  Adjusting the prompt didn’t change this.

So I gave up on the spaceship-hibernation part of it and tried concentrating on the dream in the middle.  Still having trouble, but continuing with the tests.

#Art I made with #StableDiffusion #AI

White Ring

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

Is This The Life We Really Want?

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

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

Red Ring

The vision in my head:

An intensely bright thin red ring light in the distance, a woman robot in silhouette, on an abstract shiny metal plate surface, hyper realistic, cinematic, dense atmosphere

To manifest that vision I created a floor plane with a metal shader and another black plane as the backdrop.  A simple torus primitive served as the red ring light.

I wanted the red ring to frame the figure and at first I tried placing it way in the distance, but I found that it dipped below the floor plane and I wanted to see the full ring.  Moving it closer and scaling it down created the same composition with the added bonus of shining a strong rim light onto the robot figure.

The shapes in the background are part of an abstract model that actually goes all the way around the landscape.  I found a part I liked and buried it in the fog to create a little texture in the background.

I spent quite some time adjusting the surfaces on the floor and the robot.  The entire scene is lit by the red ring.  The only other light is in the eyes.  The color and reflectivity of the surfaces really determined the quality of the image.  I wanted the floor to be shiny and reflective but not blown out.  I also wanted the robot to be in shadow.  A chrome or white surface didn’t work so the robot is actually shiny metallic dark grey and black.

Ultimately the original render was quite dark.  I felt the quality of the light was more important than the brightness.  I could always brighten it up later.

It took about seven and a half hours to render because of the fog and the dim light.  (Bright light renders a lot faster in Iray.)  I also rendered it at 14400 x 7200 so I could print it four feet wide and hang it on the wall if I really wanted to.  I’m crazy that way…

This screenshot shows the brightness of the original render just as it finished baking for seven hours.

When color correcting I brought the brightness up quite a bit while trying to maintain the quality of the light. The problem was all the detail was in the red channel since all the light was pure red.  This left even a brightened image still dark.  This is all the brightness I could get out of the original color correction:

Later I went back and tried a few other things to brighten it up more.  I figured if I could get the ring to blow out (overexpose) and become white It would still look OK and be much brighter.  My color correction software, Capture One, is quite good and of course that means it doesn’t clip the high end even if you push it quite far.  I tried all sorts of crazy things, experimenting, just to see what the software could do.

When I was screwing around with a black and white version I hit upon something…

I found that if I messed with the top end of the LUMA channel on the CURVES tool and the top end of the RGB channel on the LEVELS tool they interacted and did exactly what I wanted, blowing out the top of the red channel.  (The LUMA channel in the Curves tool somehow only adjusts contrast without changing saturation.  It’s not the same as adjusting the full RGB.)

You can see the way I set both tools at the bottom of this screenshot:

This brightened up the entire image quite a bit and It’s how I created the final color correction.

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

Music in the Metaverse

I think my CGI images tend to look better when I have something in closeup.  It avoids the “medium shot of a character just standing there” that I struggle with.  For this piece I started with an extreme close up and added cool robot eyes and dramatic flowing hair.

I also wanted a graphic background, something flat, technical.  I have an ongoing issue with backgrounds.  I get creatively stuck and I don’t know what to put back there.  I end up trying scores of different things and nothing works.

What I ended up using here was actually a huge Tron like cityscape.  The shapes and lines are actually building size structures seen from the top.  This is what the cityscape looks like normally.

The entire environment is standing on it’s side waaaaaay far away.  I turned on and off different elements depending on what looked good.  It ended up being a real hassle having the background so far away though.  Making adjustments took a long time.  (I went back and figured it out.  it’s 1.8 miles away!  …or 3 kilometers)  I should have scaled down the whole thing and moved it closer.

I named it Music in the Metaverse because the graphic lines in the background ended up looking similar to a music staff.

Created in DAZ Studio 4.20
Rendered with Iray
Color Correction in Capture One

Can AI draw a Red Ring of Light?

Recently I was experimenting with the Midjourney AI art engine.  I saw an image in my mind of a robot backlit by a red ring-light.  I typed it up as a prompt:

An intensely bright thin red ring light in the distance, a woman robot in silhouette, on an abstract shiny metal plate surface, hyper realistic, cinematic, dense atmosphere, intense, dramatic, hyper detailed, –ar 2:1 –v 5

I expected to get something like the image above.  That’s not what happened.  For the next hour I tried to get Midjourney to build something even close to what I envisioned. I typed and re-typed the prompt, changing the way I described the image.  Most of the time I couldn’t even get a red light ring.Midjourney kept trying to make a “sun” with a red sky.  There are round portal structures, some even reflecting red light, but almost none of them light up.  The light’s coming from somewhere else.

What I asked for was simple.  Why is this so hard?

I’m guessing it has to do with the data set the AI was trained on.  I bet there aren’t that many images of red light rings in there, maybe none at all.

One of the things that frustrates me about AI art is the way most things turn out looking generic, like everything you’ve seen a million times before.  This makes sense of course, because that’s how it works.  It studies what everything looks like and then create from that.  It’s almost a creation by consensus.  An unusual Red Ring isn’t part of the equation.  I could probably eventually get to what I wanted if I kept trying and perhaps made the prompts much longer describing every detail.  Maybe.

Or I could do what I did and create what I saw in my mind with CGI.

Has this put me off AI art?  No.  Every tool is good at what it’s good at, and it’s not at what it’s not.  I was looking for the edge of what this new tool could do (because that’s where the art is) and I found it.  There’s nothing really interesting right here but there’s a lot more to discover…