kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2023-02-01 01:07 pm
kane_magus) wrote2023-02-01 01:07 pm
Entry tags:
NovelAI image generation
Well, a few days ago, I went and bought NovelAI's Opus tier (the highest available, $25 USD per month, though I don't know if I'll renew it when the time comes, toward the end of next month). Up until today, I'd been using it exclusively for text/story/game-like stuff. Krake, their most advanced (so far) text-gen AI, is... fairly okay. Possibly comparable to old-school, pre-fuckup Dragon on AI Dungeon, maybe? Not perfect by any means, and I usually have to "retry" a lot due to non sequitur nonsense as well as partially edit the "passable" stuff it outputs, but when it's good, it's pretty good.
I had been completely ignoring and avoiding messing with the image generation stuff at first, mainly because I didn't have anything I cared to try to make. Until it dawned on me that I could try to make a "Kane Magus" with it. So, just before starting on this post, I generated a metric buttload of images, since with the Opus tier, images of size "normal" or smaller cost 0 Anlas (i.e. the "currency" or whatever it is they make you use for generating images, and Opus comes with something like 10,000 Anlas per month [I currently have 12,500, somehow], though I haven't used any of it yet).
Don't worry, I will not be trying to embed those images in this post, because Google Photos is shit and breaks embeds after only a day or two. I will be linking to several of them, however. And here is where I will be putting a cut, to spare my main page from the wall of text below.
So, before I start, I'll describe what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like (or you could just, like, look at the picture in that link there, which I linked to again down below). Basically, he's supposed to look like Kane from Command & Conquer (in other words, Joe Kucan, circa 1995 or so), except with a blue goatee and pointy ears (which is kinda sorta where the Magus bit comes into play). His only other defining traits are: purple cape, black shirt, black pants, brown gloves, brown boots, brown belt. And he wields a Grim Reaper-style scythe (see, again: Magus), though I quickly gave up on that in NovelAI because it looked like shit, for the most part, e.g. it would give him extra hands/arms or the scythe didn't look anything like a scythe or whatever; in any case I won't be uploading those to Google Photos.
To start with, I will give some examples of non-NovelAI art, mostly old OtakuWars![1] fan art to show what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like, before going into the NovelAI image gen stuff.
Here is the first ever piece of art of Kane Magus, drawn by me, in MS Paint, way back in 1998. It's absolute shit, of course, but it was mainly drawn as a reference piece for someone else to use to draw a much better version.
Here is that much better version of the above, drawn by Teryl Marble II, aka T-Chan, as OW! fanart. This was the first ever non-me piece of Kane Magus art that I can recall now.
Here is one of KM in his "Dan Hibiki/Saikyo" phase, when he wore pink instead of black, drawn by Jason Tucker, aka Ryu in the OW!
Similarly, here is one by Robin Torraville, aka Kobanal in the OW!. (Note, too, the lightsaber in his belt in this one.)
And you can see the Kane Magus sprite here in Mord's page for the defunct OW!RPG.
And here is a non-OW! (and long-since deleted) version of him that I created in The Sims Medieval many years ago.
So yeah, that is what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like.
And, now, here are several of the many variants of what NovelAI thinks a "Kane Magus" should look like, based on the tags I supplied to the AI. Said tags were variations of a baseline "male, bald head, blue goatee, pointy ears, purple cape, black shirt, brown gloves" and such that I started with. I'm not going to upload all of that shit to Google Photos (there are 105 image files in the zip file I downloaded from the NovelAI site, and most of them are fair-to-middling at best).
This was its very first attempt, which is actually pretty good... except that it decided to leave out most of the shirt, for whatever reason. o_O Also, just to note, Kane Magus is nowhere even remotely that buff (neither the fictional, OW! version, nor the real life dude for whom he is the online avatar).
After this, I have no idea the order they were created, because there isn't any proper timestamp info associated with the files I downloaded from the NovelAI site, so I'll just upload some of what I think are the best attempts by the AI (and then, maybe a few of the worst attempts, just for shits and giggles). The main points of contention were that the AI usually forgot the "blue" part of "blue goatee" (and sometimes the "goatee" part, too), and it also sometimes swapped the colors (that is, it gave him a purple goatee and a blue cape, instead of the other way around). And sometimes, it tended to give him more of a soul patch, i.e. hair only on the chin, instead of (what I consider to be) a proper, full goatee, i.e. hair surrounding mouth, above and below. Also, for whatever reason, it very often insisted on giving him earrings, which shouldn't be there, but I quickly gave up on trying to prevent that, because, meh, fuck it. It didn't look terrible, even so.
So, in no particular order (or, rather, in the order that they happen to be sorted, by name, on my SSD), here are some of what I consider to be the best of the NovelAI image generator's attempts at making a "Kane Magus," even if they're not perfect: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and #7.
Here are a few I did of the "Kane Chaos" character from the Otakuwars!.[1] This is Kane Magus, except possessed by Chaos (though Chaos was... rather a bit different in the OW! than he was in canon Sailor Moon). As far as look goes, it's mostly the same as normal Kane Magus, except he has glowing eyes.
Here is a non-NovelAI reference pic (by T-Chan) of what "Kane Chaos" looks like.
And here are a few examples of NovelAI's interpretation of him, with the pink clothes just to shake things up a bit: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 (I particularly like that last one there, even if the face and colors on the left figure still aren't exactly right).
And, lastly, here are a couple of the... less accurate versions of KM: #1. No clue who that douche bag on the right is supposed to be. And #2. This was the result the one and only time I tried to replace the "pointy ears" tag with "spock ears," and all other tags (e.g. "black shirt") being the same.
So yeah, that's the result of me playing around with NovelAI's image generation thing for a few minutes. This post took way longer to write than the entirety of the time I spent messing around with that stuff. As far as I'm concerned, the image gen stuff is a fun little toy to mess around with for a little while, but I don't think that will ever replace the text-gen stuff in importance, at least for me.
Also, sadly, not to put too fine a point on it, none of the original artists for any of the above (those whose art was almost assuredly illicitly used to train the AI, that is) can be credited here, because I don't have the first clue who any of them are, for obvious reasons.
[1] - And if you don't know what the OtakuWars! are (and don't want to bother looking back through all my old posts on the subject linked to there)... then... um, I'll just link toowsf2000's old OW! site as a cop-out, because I really don't wanna get into explaining all that shit right now. ¬_¬
I had been completely ignoring and avoiding messing with the image generation stuff at first, mainly because I didn't have anything I cared to try to make. Until it dawned on me that I could try to make a "Kane Magus" with it. So, just before starting on this post, I generated a metric buttload of images, since with the Opus tier, images of size "normal" or smaller cost 0 Anlas (i.e. the "currency" or whatever it is they make you use for generating images, and Opus comes with something like 10,000 Anlas per month [I currently have 12,500, somehow], though I haven't used any of it yet).
Don't worry, I will not be trying to embed those images in this post, because Google Photos is shit and breaks embeds after only a day or two. I will be linking to several of them, however. And here is where I will be putting a cut, to spare my main page from the wall of text below.
So, before I start, I'll describe what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like (or you could just, like, look at the picture in that link there, which I linked to again down below). Basically, he's supposed to look like Kane from Command & Conquer (in other words, Joe Kucan, circa 1995 or so), except with a blue goatee and pointy ears (which is kinda sorta where the Magus bit comes into play). His only other defining traits are: purple cape, black shirt, black pants, brown gloves, brown boots, brown belt. And he wields a Grim Reaper-style scythe (see, again: Magus), though I quickly gave up on that in NovelAI because it looked like shit, for the most part, e.g. it would give him extra hands/arms or the scythe didn't look anything like a scythe or whatever; in any case I won't be uploading those to Google Photos.
To start with, I will give some examples of non-NovelAI art, mostly old OtakuWars![1] fan art to show what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like, before going into the NovelAI image gen stuff.
Here is the first ever piece of art of Kane Magus, drawn by me, in MS Paint, way back in 1998. It's absolute shit, of course, but it was mainly drawn as a reference piece for someone else to use to draw a much better version.
Here is that much better version of the above, drawn by Teryl Marble II, aka T-Chan, as OW! fanart. This was the first ever non-me piece of Kane Magus art that I can recall now.
Here is one of KM in his "Dan Hibiki/Saikyo" phase, when he wore pink instead of black, drawn by Jason Tucker, aka Ryu in the OW!
Similarly, here is one by Robin Torraville, aka Kobanal in the OW!. (Note, too, the lightsaber in his belt in this one.)
And you can see the Kane Magus sprite here in Mord's page for the defunct OW!RPG.
And here is a non-OW! (and long-since deleted) version of him that I created in The Sims Medieval many years ago.
So yeah, that is what a "Kane Magus" is supposed to look like.
And, now, here are several of the many variants of what NovelAI thinks a "Kane Magus" should look like, based on the tags I supplied to the AI. Said tags were variations of a baseline "male, bald head, blue goatee, pointy ears, purple cape, black shirt, brown gloves" and such that I started with. I'm not going to upload all of that shit to Google Photos (there are 105 image files in the zip file I downloaded from the NovelAI site, and most of them are fair-to-middling at best).
This was its very first attempt, which is actually pretty good... except that it decided to leave out most of the shirt, for whatever reason. o_O Also, just to note, Kane Magus is nowhere even remotely that buff (neither the fictional, OW! version, nor the real life dude for whom he is the online avatar).
After this, I have no idea the order they were created, because there isn't any proper timestamp info associated with the files I downloaded from the NovelAI site, so I'll just upload some of what I think are the best attempts by the AI (and then, maybe a few of the worst attempts, just for shits and giggles). The main points of contention were that the AI usually forgot the "blue" part of "blue goatee" (and sometimes the "goatee" part, too), and it also sometimes swapped the colors (that is, it gave him a purple goatee and a blue cape, instead of the other way around). And sometimes, it tended to give him more of a soul patch, i.e. hair only on the chin, instead of (what I consider to be) a proper, full goatee, i.e. hair surrounding mouth, above and below. Also, for whatever reason, it very often insisted on giving him earrings, which shouldn't be there, but I quickly gave up on trying to prevent that, because, meh, fuck it. It didn't look terrible, even so.
So, in no particular order (or, rather, in the order that they happen to be sorted, by name, on my SSD), here are some of what I consider to be the best of the NovelAI image generator's attempts at making a "Kane Magus," even if they're not perfect: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and #7.
Here are a few I did of the "Kane Chaos" character from the Otakuwars!.[1] This is Kane Magus, except possessed by Chaos (though Chaos was... rather a bit different in the OW! than he was in canon Sailor Moon). As far as look goes, it's mostly the same as normal Kane Magus, except he has glowing eyes.
Here is a non-NovelAI reference pic (by T-Chan) of what "Kane Chaos" looks like.
And here are a few examples of NovelAI's interpretation of him, with the pink clothes just to shake things up a bit: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 (I particularly like that last one there, even if the face and colors on the left figure still aren't exactly right).
And, lastly, here are a couple of the... less accurate versions of KM: #1. No clue who that douche bag on the right is supposed to be. And #2. This was the result the one and only time I tried to replace the "pointy ears" tag with "spock ears," and all other tags (e.g. "black shirt") being the same.
So yeah, that's the result of me playing around with NovelAI's image generation thing for a few minutes. This post took way longer to write than the entirety of the time I spent messing around with that stuff. As far as I'm concerned, the image gen stuff is a fun little toy to mess around with for a little while, but I don't think that will ever replace the text-gen stuff in importance, at least for me.
Also, sadly, not to put too fine a point on it, none of the original artists for any of the above (those whose art was almost assuredly illicitly used to train the AI, that is) can be credited here, because I don't have the first clue who any of them are, for obvious reasons.
[1] - And if you don't know what the OtakuWars! are (and don't want to bother looking back through all my old posts on the subject linked to there)... then... um, I'll just link to
owsf2000's old OW! site as a cop-out, because I really don't wanna get into explaining all that shit right now. ¬_¬