RPG characters with AI image creation
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Winter’s Warriors is made up of some of the oldest characters in my roster. Some of them go back to when the original Gold Box games were new. Some of them are even older than that. They don’t always map well into strict class definitions, but they’ve been with me *forever*. This group is led by the Lady Katarina de Winter, the daughter of a duke who abandoned her birthright to be a wandering adventurer, taking her bodyguard and best friend with her and acquiring new companions along the way.
I good looking crew! I especially like the one with Katarina and Percy eating together.
That one was actually surprisingly difficult. I tried all sorts of different scenes with Katarina and Percy, but the AI just did not seem to like the concept of a shot with a man and a woman where the woman was much taller than the man. So it kept switching them around. I had to lead with “tall human woman eating at a campfire with short Halfling man” and then add the descriptions of them as individuals to get it to come out right. The shots of Kordaal and Solstice were much easier. They are thematically similar, and the only issue was it occasionally giving Kordaal elf ears.
that is funny! I think generally, it doesn’t do so well with smaller races. I have a pair of Halflings for my upcoming BG run, and I really had a hard time getting them right. At the same time, I was playing around with a combat ready Lemur and that came out great, no problem. Go figure.
I’ve also concluded it can’t do historic subjects. It knows nothing about airplanes or ships. I would have thought it would be able to find references for such things, but it doesn’t seem to be able.
It really seems to want to make Halfling an into something more like an impish elf, and hobbits more like a frump squire. I usually end up adding a bunch of terms like stout, broad shouldered, and wide face to counteract the pixie look.
As for planes and such, it seems very style dependent. Recall my son getting a good anime crossbow when my own iwd style has never managed anything close.
”Wide face” sounds like a particularly handy term to remember. Because yeah, that;s exactly the problem with Halflings, they tend to just look like elves. Or even humans. I do really like the two I finally came up with, but I like Halflings and I’ll have to remember that one!
Airplanes are funny. I was playing around with subjects that any search engine could find. But for some reason (maybe concerns about rights and licensing?) the AI would rather make things up entirely. It doesn’t even make knowledgeable approximations. Its attempt at an F3F was as bad as a crossbow.
Not sure how much of the Halfling thing is that modern fantasy thinks of them more like we remember kender and how much is just the AI.
It’s hard to tell sometimes about what is intentionally left out due to IP concerns. They don’t just refuse to draw certain things, they actively exclude them from the training set. And whether the omission was intentionally (Mickey Mouae) or accidental (fantasy crossbows) either way you end up with the AI having no idea what you mean.
I wasn’t sure about this whole project when I started doing it, but I’m glad for your comment in the Beamdog forums about doing it for your own purposes rather than worrying about the audience. Just making the portraits and putting all the stories and connections to the page has really helped solidify a lot of them in my head, and reminded me why some of these folks have stuck with me for so long. And having it all organized and tied together like this means next time I start a run from my rotation I don’t have to spend time remembering who goes with who and how they all fit together. Its right there waiting for me. Including the motley bunch going into “character sketches” that don’t get out much because they don’t have a pre-existing home.
Thank you for that! It’s great to hear. Of course my bit of wisdom came from some disappointment, but you are correct.
It is great to be able sort things out and put them up the way I want to.
of course, I’d add what you’ve shown me for making portraits has led to me thinking up another half dozen playthroughs. So I’ll be working up a bunch more material for my site too!
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