In other news, it's time I talked a bit more about artwork.
Wow, is artwork cool nowadays.
So the first thing I thought when I set out to make my artwork is that I'm terrible at drawing and my photoshop skills are rudimentary at best. So my idea was to find a bunch of people who made fanart for my favorite games, use their artwork, convert to vector, and copy and paste them all together in a collage. It didn't go super well and I wasn't too happy with my progress. That is until I started trying to do the same thing with an AI image generator.
Up till this point I had heard of AI Image generation of course, but had not really tried it more then once or twice with some really terrible ones. But for this, I got a bit more indepth.
The basic business model for all of these AI image generators is that you sign up for a free account, and they give a certain number of credits a day. Each of those credits are roughly equal to 1 image generated. Some of the AI image generators will generate more or less images based on options you select such as longer run times, or stricter prompt guidance, etc. You can of course pay them money and get WAY more credits a day/week/month/year (depending on the business model), but I did not want to pay for more when I figured I could get this done for free. And I did get it done, but it took a few weeks using free credits to figure out what the ai is good at and what it's not good at and adjust my design accordingly.
It is not good at making a specific video game character for instance. Want a generic wizard? No trouble. Want to generate Chun-Li? Ehhh probably not. For instance, an early effort of mine was to generate Mario and the teenage mutant ninja turtles playing an arcade machine:
The results are.... weird. That's because the AI doesn't know that we have VERY specific ideas about how a teenage mutant ninja turtle should look or proportions for mario. The AI is instead used to embelishing things and when it's making wizards or cat girls or whatever, that's fine. But when we want something VERY specific, it doesn't do as well. There are ways to make it better using existing images to train the AI, but generally that wasn't available through the free options.
Here is one where I wanted Darth Vader and Mario fighting batman:
For whatever reason it decided to combine mario and batman together..... ya. So not great at this kind of thing.
Over time my design evolved in large part based on what I could easily get out of the AI. Curiously, AI is really bad at text. I really wanted it to have a sign saying "ARCADE" in a cityscape, but it kept throwing letters out of order or making up new words.
Here is one of the better cityscape ones:
But as you can see, it added more signs that were not spelled correctly.
Eventually I settled on more simple designs, but along the way I came up with a bunch of options. Here are some of them:
Ultimately I have more or less settled on doing a circuit board cyberpunk design for my cabinet. It looks nice and is relatively easy for the AI to generate. I haven't ordered it yet, but I'm 90% sure it will look something like this:
For those interesting in following in my footsteps the AI generators I used are Leonardo.ai nightcafe.studio, and limewire.com