More Stable Diffusion stuff. In this post, I went for mythical creature scenery.
I decided on two things
- Use a very long aspect ratio. I had it generate 1024×128 images.
- I would see what I could do by layering similar images in Photoshop and selecting different portions.
In order to get similar images, I would send an image back through the WebUI using the Image-to-Image tool.
Prompt below:
odette, fighting a dragon, wyvern, pheonix, fighting over city skyline, beautiful scenery, mythical, celestial, nature documentary footage, volcano lightning, pyroclastic flow, cinematic angle, fast motion, majestic scenery, vortex, realistic, gigantic mythical majestic monsters clashing, towering creatures, giant wingspan, northern lights, god rays
And I decided to make some webm animations of the Photoshop layers being built up. 10 images. So this isn’t inpainting or a plugin integrated into a DCC. I reckon I’ll get there eventually, but I’m in no rush.
Scavengers
We’ll start off with the least technical. The narrative of this one basically stayed the same, with some squiddy-thingies flying around. I just got some variations and tried to make the visuals more interesting to my tastes.
Windigo
Not wendigos, but windigos – because, I don’t know why…
I wanted a long dragon and was sure I could coax one out if I kept ‘re-rolling’ the image. I also didn’t like the dragon in the lower-center foreground, so you can see where I heal brushed it out of existence, hoping for a do-over.
Weather Dragon
This one stayed pretty similar, just layering elements for the blast, and doing touch-ups on the dragon here and there. At some point, the right side started getting worse weather than the left side, and I decided that would be an explicit thing to aim for.
Staredown
This one started drastically different. It almost started off with an eastern art-nouveau-type vibe. I couldn’t get the black blob on the left to turn anything decent, so when it gave me a fully formed dragon in another style, I pivoted toward that. At some point, trying to stitch the red dragon together, the AI just gave me a pretty good fully formed one, so I ditched the one I was building up.
Showdown
This one, I mostly knew what I wanted, and the AI was being pretty agreeable in giving me good elements.
Lander
The AI gave me some weird two-legged walker. I figured I could use a break from flying things, but I wanted 4 legs, so I changed the prompt and liquified the image a bit to be suggestive.
I may have picked at the background too much, and left some splotches from unerased areas.
Hard Blow
Started off with 1 creature, but more kept emerging. So I threw in a city and had these creatures go-to-town on this town on this beautiful day.
Dragon Work
I only have half of the layers in this webm. So for the first frame of the video, that’s really the halfway mark of the work effort. For example, originally, the tail and the wing were fused, and I had to manually draw them as separated to get the AI to stop leaving those forms merged together.
Dragon Witch
Well, there was a winged structure, I guess I tried to make it into a giant winged woman, and that consumed a lot of effort. But in the end, I’m meh about this one. It feels like 3 different images crammed together, and things got pretty blurry in the end.
China Shop
For this one, I started by using the heal brush to get rid of whatever was on the left. From there, the AI started adding city elements, and I leaned into the concept of a dragon that laid absolute waste in its wake and was continuing onwards toward an unsuspecting civilization.
As things progressed, I mostly focused on the intense red of the destruction and chose things that gave the destruction a large sense of scale. The dragon started off as a hot mess, and I selectively chose things that converted into,… my preference of a hot mess.
Scenery & Honorable Mentions
And just because I have these assets, here’s some scenery. These are from the same batch. While the prompt specified to create creatures, it also has landscape and weather effects – and sometimes there wouldn’t be any creatures generated, but the landscapes were decent.
These images are unedited since it’s not really a big issue when landscapes aren’t properly formed (discombobulated is the term I’ve been using). Such a thing may even be undetectable for AI generated natural landscape images.
And I had to throw this one in here. This is the only dragon that was correctly formed, out of the ~150 images originally generated.
Conclusion
There’s an addictive property to this workflow. It’s essentially the psychological cycle of a one-arm bandit or a loot box. Basically, there are things you’d like to change about the image; you guess some image generation settings, let the AI loose, and hope you get some winners. If not, you do just one more round to get your fix.
I gotta scratch that itch! I swear, just a few more generated images! I know I said that the last few times before, but this time I mean it!