{"id":5352,"date":"2023-04-26T19:40:19","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T14:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fletcherstudios.net\/blog1\/?p=5352"},"modified":"2023-04-26T19:41:07","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T14:41:07","slug":"side-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fletcherstudios.net\/blog1\/2023\/04\/26\/side-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Side Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

or: How AI failed me, but Unity came shining through.<\/p>\n

Coming from a art back ground, I get the odd commission here and there – it helps buy things for my game dev journey.<\/p>\n

My mother-in-law came to me with a request: she had a dream about a cabin on the beach, it was very peaceful and relaxing; and she’d very much like it if I painted it for her.<\/p>\n

Being eager to try AI art generation, I sat down with her and had her describe as much as she could in exacting detail. And we spent the better part of an afternoon feeding prompts into my local install of Automatic 1111 and seeing what it would spit out.<\/p>\n

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She ‘liked’ what she saw, but felt it was ‘too resort-like’ and ‘too plastic-y’; not keeping with the humble esthetic she’d dreamed about. After a few more tries with negative prompts, we had to call it quits to feed kiddos and take a break from her growing frustration with the process.<\/p>\n

About a week later, she texted me- excited she had found a photo in the paper that was more true to the dream and brought it to the next family gathering:<\/p>\n

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It was small, and printed in that obnoxious half-tone process newspapers use, which made it low resolution. And very grainy.<\/p>\n

So- hello Google Reverse image search. Found a better version and started Photoshopping things with a renewed energy. Found different images that she liked and started editing them together. Added filters and adjustment layers, tweaking things left and right.<\/p>\n

And she still wasn’t thrilled with the result:<\/p>\n

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I think this was the best version done on Photoshop<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What it boiled down to was this: the cabin image was just too flat and two dimensional to really get the ‘look’ she was after. Since it was too flat – I felt I must<\/strong> make it 3D.<\/p>\n

\"\"
round and round we go<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Taking a cue from Ian Hubert’s Lazy Tutorials – I took the photos I found and began modeling. The tut in reference is:<\/p>\n