sbloyd

February 7

...and stop-motion puppet sure looks interesting!

February 7

17 hours ago, DougGraves said:

I stop my characters at level 19. Builds are very tight at 19, so I fuss with them a lot.

For tankers I play rad mostly, it is well rounded and sturdy at that level (WP also works). As I was fiddling with a rad/claws I discovered that I only needed 1 EM slot in Stamina. I had been 3 slotting stamina because I just got used to doing that.

So now I can go back and redo my other rad tankers to get 2 slots out of Stamina.

So how confident are you that you have the right amount of END, recharge, ACC, etc. slotted in your powers? Or do you just go with the idea that more is better and you have slots to burn?

I'm 100% confident that my Warshade is not. I just find respeccing a PITA.

February 7

Adding style of vector art alongside cel shaded yields some nice results for my usual prompt lead-up:

February 7

CoH is just that EXTREEEEEEEME!

February 7

1 hour ago, Techwright said:

Next up on my attempts was my little ray of Summer-of-Love sunshine, the mentally-stuck-in-1967 water Sentinel, Aged Of Aquarius. See his in-game version here.

I must say, although Bing's image generator never hit every point I was making (it had no idea what to do with "purple shoulder pads"), every image it generated was spiritually right on target. I really liked this attempt. The hard part was culling the results down to just a few.

Although I tweaked the description several times, here's the core of it: thin, smiling 76-year-old Caucasian hippy male, scraggly long grey hair, round wire glasses, green and blue tie-die long-sleeve T-shirt with pink and yellow peace symbol on center front, tight blue jeans with bell bottoms and embroidered gold stars, brown sleeveless jacket with high collar, purple short fingerless leather gloves, standing in shallow pool of splashing water, water jets from his raised hands

I really like Bottom Middle.

February 6

I've been tinkering from time to time trying to get a rendition of my Beam Rifle Sentinel, Sox, an alleycat implanted in the chest of a suit of powered armor.

a suit of human shaped red and gold steampunk powered armor with an entire black and white alleycat sitting where the head and chest should be, carrying a futuristic beam rifle

The hard part was getting to to not just put a cat head on a Space Marine.

February 6

19 minutes ago, OldManMercy said:

Couple of questions:

1) Prompts are fairly universal, yes? I.E. they'd garner the mostly same results across the various generator platforms? (I ask because I'm using free online ones atm)

2) I'm having difficulty getting results for two characters of mine. One is basically a living pile of amorphous garbage and the other is a drow female that has a rather muscular body type.
Prompt suggestions for both?

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions!!

1- No. They're totally dependant upon what models the generator is trained on. If I have a generator that's trained only on, say, Pixar characters the results will be a lot different than one that's trained on everything on DeviantArt.

2 - It's hard to get a drow; I guess there's a lot of dark elf pr0n out there. Best I was able to get is...

...but that was after a LOT of tries the system kicked out. The prompt was

wide angle, full body, cel shaded, fantasy, style of artstation, character design, character turnaround, concept art, reference sheet, elf woman, pointy ears, long white hair, dark purple skin, glowing red eyes

Trash guy, though... is a little TOO humanoid:

character design, humanoid shape made out of garbage, tricicyle for a head, crouched in an alleyway

February 6

Using the Microsoft creator, I've hit the text limit on the prompts; luckily it appears that going into Copilot and saying "Draw me a picture with the following prompt: blah blah" gets you around that. Whew!

February 6

February 6

Being able to also place our chest insignia on the back and on the shoulders would be fun:

...but I don't know if the system can "read" our logo from other costume parts.

While we're at it, a nice undercut or sideshaved hairstyle would be keen.

February 6

Adding "concept art" to my character-turnaround prompt looks pretty good, too. Here's one:

February 6

Microsoft Creator does a pretty decent job of rendering Kheldian forms, surprisingly!

February 6

A lot depends on playing style and what one finds fun versus tolerable versus tedious. My riches were built off the Auction House and Converter Roulette. I can absolutely see how many would find such a thing tedious to the extreme; I get around the tedium by having a second monitor and watching Warhammer 40k battles while I churn my sales... and I don't push it near as hard as some of our mercantile heroes.

I don't think it's appropriate to tell someone "you're just not trying hard enough" when they say they can't afford to purchase enough Aether for a tier 3 costume. If it weren't for my deep pockets I wouldn't be able to afford it either, as my play interests don't get me any Aether at all (with the exception of the Halloween event, and that was almost accidental). Adding new avenues to access Aether is a good thing, IMHO.

February 6

Yo, dawg, we heard you liked goggles...

February 5

Shower thought time: maybe an intermediate difficulty step where the self-res is instead a self-Extracted Essence summon? (To represent the Nictus fragment tearing free.)

February 5

RE: my character being a total dump truck... I think I actually did have a Pixar preset flagged, hah hah!

February 5

Back to the fun stuff!

One interesting thing about Stable Diffusion is that you can feed it a base image alongside a text prompt. I took a screenshot of my main, Horizon Twilight, and did a couple iterations of generation on it:

...might have to go visit Icon, I think!

(And hoo-boy, my Stable Diffusion likes them thicc!)

February 5

Yeah, AI generative art doesn't *directly* take anything from anyone. It does , for lack of a better word, learn by examining thousands of pieces of art to create algorithmic data which is associated with certain keywords, and which gets used as part of the output when we use various keywords in our prompt requests. The question, which is beyond the scope of discussion here, is whether this is ethical or not. I have a fine art degree equivalent to a Masters, and I'll tell you, we are made to mimic other artists' work over and over; you have to ask yourself whether there's any difference between the two.

Me, I see AI generative art as a toy, and a tool, to work on my own art. One of the software packages I use includes built-in, posable 3D models of people, common locations, et cetera. You can literally load them into the drawing program, pose them, and trace them. It's just another tool.

One nice thing Bing has done is an attempt to exclude using specific peoples' likenesses - generally it will kick out a prompt with someone's name - though from time to time people have figured out ways around it. Those situations - from MS's generator to Stable Diffusion to other generators - are where we get weird and disturbing things involving deepfakes.

Anyhow, it's up to each of us individually to decide how we use these tools. If you feel like it's inappropriate... then don't use 'em. I certainly don't try to pass off the results as my own work, but it's very interesting to generate a dozen or so images and see how the different weights and randomizers and seeds all fall together to create an image. Either way, I hope we can agree to let it rest (at least here - this doesn't feel like the right venue for such discussions).

February 4

6 hours ago, Techwright said:

This looks like some alternate universe cross between The Phantom and The Green Hornet, which I find rather cool.

By the way, what is "Art Station Style" that I see a couple of you mentioning?

It's just a way to make the system limit itself in certain ways. A lot of the front-page artists on Artstation have some similar design themes, so it's a handy one I can remember. You could also do "Style of John Byrne" and it transforms results to something like and "cyberpunk style" gets me .

Not very different, but consistent. Taking out the style requestor, I get these four results:

...which, while not BAD, are inconsistent in style from result to result.

At the same time, you can pull out "cel shaded" which forces a cartoon/comic book style and replace it with something like "painterly style" and get something akin to which can be very appealing. Sometimes it doesn't know what to do with some style prompts; I asked it for "Impressionistic style" and got and and in the same round of outputs. Really though, that wasn't fair, since Impressionism isn't something there's a lot of superhero picture samples around. A "watercolor painting" style prompt yields . You can also try things like "lineart style" or you could go way retro with "style of roy lichtenstein" and get type results.

February 4

1 hour ago, BurtHutt said:

Wow. I haven't messed around with the AI tools yet but wow...that's insane stuff it can produce.

For those of you that are making all of these cool pieces, how long does it take you to do one?

Depends. Using Microsoft's image creator, using their tokens, it's a couple seconds. Once you run out of tokens, it's a few minutes.

February 2

13 minutes ago, Andreah said:

There are other, non-gameplay, ways to make money, too. Both take some artistic skill:

Enter and win costume contests

Make and sell Supergroup Bases

My first billions were made on the Everlasting CC circuit, though that's not as active as it used to be. Once I had a nest egg, I went all-in on Converter Roulette on the AH. For the longest time my "system" was to run with Veracor's afternoon Hamidon, pick Reward Merits for both rewards, then beeline over to the MSR and do that, converting everything to Rewards, then shifting the whole shebang to Converters.

Then I bought a bunch of crap recipes off the AH, and started rolling the dice!

February 2

Just now, Marshal_General said:

Don't you guys have phones?

🤪

I work in a big, ancient school building, solid as a rock. No signal. 😞

February 2

I would love flag designs on a center panel - separate from the keyed colors and patterns, similar to some of the later designs like Imperial (I think) that had static gold design elements. Like...

or

February 2

I wish I could see these, but work blocks your image provider.

February 2

Oh, man, I wish I knew about this. I have a rather nice bayou base....

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