AI-powered relighting & resyling is a hell of a drug!
Elias Artista (Senior Environment Artist at Bethesda Game Studios) will guide you step by step in this video:pic.twitter.com/vDCDooimXc
— Javi Lopez (@javilopen) July 19, 2024
Pretty cool! I’d love to see Illustrator support model import & rendering of this sort, such that models could be re-posed in one’s .Ai doc, but this still looks like a solid approach:
3D meets 2D!
With the Expressive or Pixel Art styles in Project Neo, you can export your designs as SVGs to edit in Illustrator or use on your websites. pic.twitter.com/vOsjb2S2Un
— Howard Pinsky (@Pinsky) July 11, 2024
I love the rich detail that Steve Cutts packs into every frame of this bleak rendering of our screen-addicted world:
And if that’s not quite enough a mood for ya, try “Happiness”:
Man, what I wouldn’t have given years ago, when we were putting 3D support into Photoshop, for the ability to compute meshes from objects (e.g. a photo of a soda can or a shirt) in order to facilitate object placement like this.
Who’d a thunk it? But now everyone is getting into the game:
“Combine your ink strokes with text prompts to generate new images in nearly real time with Cocreator,” Microsoft explains. “As you iterate, so does the artwork, helping you more easily refine, edit and evolve your ideas. Powerful diffusion-based algorithms optimize for the highest quality output over minimum steps to make it feel like you are creating alongside AI.”
Martin Evening combines Adobe Substance 3D modeler and Krea to go from 3D sketch to burning rubber:
I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty incredible..
Adobe Substance 3D modeler and Krea mainly here.
Quick, gestural 3d sculpting plus ai =(I think I’ve said that a few times haven’t I?) #ai #art pic.twitter.com/w0ZhBvQ0Pr
— Martin Nebelong (@MartinNebelong) May 13, 2024
Jon Finger combines a whole slew of tools for sketch->AR:
More playing with a Procreate to Simulon pipeline. It’s still a rough pipeline but fun to play with.
Sketched in @Procreate
Style transfer in @Magnific_AI
3d conversion in @fondantai
Motion capture in @MoveAI_
Rigged in @MaxonVFX c4d
Final capture on @Simulon pic.twitter.com/GiI1wJ2IWR— Jon Finger (@mrjonfinger) May 13, 2024
I came across this post (originally from 2017) just now while looking for other work from Paul Asente. Here’s hoping it can finally see the light of day in Illustrator! —J.
———–
Paul Asente is an OG of the graphics world, having been responsible for (if I recall correctly) everything from Illustrator’s vector meshes & art brushes to variable-width strokes. Now he’s back with new Adobe illustration tech to drop some millefleurs science:
PhysicsPak automatically fills a shape with copies of elements, growing, stretching, and distorting them to fill the space. It uses a physics simulation to do this and to control the amount of distortion.
[YouTube]
Man, who knew that posting the tweet below would get me absolutely dragged by AI haters (“Worst. Dad. Ever.”) who briefly turned me into the Bean Dad of AI art? I should say more about that eye-opening experience, but for now, enjoy (unlike apparently thousands of others!) this innocuous mixing of AI & kid art:
Having fun reinterpreting my son’s old drawings via #AdobeFirefly Structure Reference: pic.twitter.com/ALLBqdyPEc
— John Nack (@jnack) April 16, 2024
Elsewhere, here’s a cool thread showing how even simple sketches can be interpreted in the style of 3D renderings via Magnific:
THIS IS NOT 3D
Did you know you can use AI as kind of pseudo 3d renderer?
In the future, every pixel in a video game will not be RENDERED but GENERATED in real time. But people are already creating insane “AI renders” today.
Here are 18 mind blowing examples + a tutorial: pic.twitter.com/MujuYpJcO3
— Javi Lopez (@javilopen) April 16, 2024
Check out Min Choi’s crossbreeding of Star Wars characters with iconic paintings (click tweet below to see the thread):
3. “The Scream” by Edvard Munch pic.twitter.com/a3FchLr4B4
— Min Choi (@minchoi) May 4, 2024
Here’s a look at his process (also a thread):
Yesterday, I showed wild AI results of famous art in Star Wars style using Midjourney v6.
Here are the comparison to original art.
How did AI do?
1. “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci pic.twitter.com/7Y4r08TQPJ
— Min Choi (@minchoi) May 5, 2024
You can try this now at Meta.ai. I’m very curious to see how much people favor speed vs. output quality.
Meta’s new AI does crazy realtime image generation…feels like improv or a tool for karaoke pic.twitter.com/uzzJ3g4lxD
— Scott Stein (@jetscott) April 19, 2024
Hey, I know what you know (or quite possibly less :-)), but this demo (which for some reason includes Shaq) looks pretty cool:
From the description:
Elevate your data storytelling with #ProjectInfographIt, a game-changing solution leveraging Adobe Firefly generative AI. Simplify the infographic creation process by instantly generating design elements tailored to your key messages and data. With intuitive features for color palettes, chart types, graphics, and animations, effortlessly transform complex insights into visually stunning infographics.
It’s amazing to see what two people (?!) are able to do. Check out this video & the linked thread, as well as the tool itself.
IT’S FINALLY HERE!
Magnific Style Transfer!
Transform any image, controlling the amount of style transferred and the structural integrity Infinite use cases! 3d, video games, interior design, for fun…
Details, 10 tutorials & HUGE surprise pic.twitter.com/mtR3tVwKmR
— Javi Lopez (@javilopen) March 18, 2024
I’m gonna have a ball going down this rabbit hole, especially for type:
OMG, I’m gonna get completely addicted to @Magnific_AI stylization for typography, aren’t I? pic.twitter.com/6KzppIBTxE
— John Nack (@jnack) March 20, 2024
OMG, any one who’s ever worked in an agency, or for any client, will instantly relate. Enjoy!
“I swear if you release that, I’m gonna cut off my goddamn ear…” :-p
[Via Thushan Amarasiriwardena]
I cannot tell you how deeply I hope that the Photoshop team is paying attention to developments like this…
My Photoshop is more fun than yours :-p With a bit of help from Krea ai.
It’s a crazy feeling to see brushstrokes transformed like this in realtime.. And the feeling of control is magnitudes better than with text prompts.#ai #art pic.twitter.com/Rd8zSxGfqD
— Martin Nebelong (@MartinNebelong) March 12, 2024
During our recent road trip to Death Valley, my 15yo son rolled his eyes at nature’s majesty:
“These mountains suck. They just look like lazy Illustrator gradients.”
Ah, the perils of raising a snarky teenage graphic designer. pic.twitter.com/Xjg356viko
— John Nack (@jnack) March 4, 2024
This made me chuckle & remember “Subpar Parks,” a visual celebration of the most dismissive reviews of our natural treasures. My wife & I have long decorated our workspaces with these unintentional gems, and I think you’ll dig the Insta feed & book (now complemented by “Subpar Planet“).
Check out this fun & useful new feature aimed at the needs of packaging designers:
I had the pleasure of hanging out with these crazy-fast-moving guys last week, and I remain amazed at the speed of their shipping velocity. Check out the latest updates to their realtime canvas:
big upgrades to quality!
announcing Portrait, Concept, CGI, and Cartoon.
try them for free in KREA real-time (link below). pic.twitter.com/iLqyWHT1Vn
— KREA AI (@krea_ai) January 25, 2024
Check out how trailblazing artist Martin Nebelong is putting it to use:
Speaking about control.. another step in the right direction!
Testing out the latest Krea ai updates.. crazy stuff
Combined with some Magnific ai magic.#ai #art pic.twitter.com/9Zz4JY4W15
— Martin Nebelong (@MartinNebelong) January 26, 2024
Helping discover Dave Werner & bring him into Adobe remains one of my favorite accomplishments at the company. He continues to do great work in designing characters as well as the tools that can bring them to life. Watch how he combines Firefly with Adobe Character Animator to create & animate a stylish tiger:
Adobe Firefly’s text to image feature lets you generate imaginative characters and assets with AI. But what if you want to turn them into animated characters with performance capture and control over elements like arm movements, pupils, talking, and more? In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of taking a static Adobe Firefly character and turning it into an animated puppet using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator plus Character Animator.
Let’s talk vector generation, 3D mockup support, image-to-type, and more. Take ‘er away, Deke!
If you’ve been sleeping on Text to Vector, check out this handful of quick how-to vids that’ll get you up to speed:
Check out this quick demo of Illustrator’s new text-to-vector & mockup tools working together:
AI generated Logos onto any surface. pic.twitter.com/qY4tEkVK0Q
— Riley Brown (@rileybrown_ai) October 29, 2023
Short & sweet:
Adobe Illustrator has this feature called Retype (beta). With it you can select an image in Illustrator and enter Retype (beta) to determine the fonts that were used (at least close matches) in the JPG! It will also do the same for text that has been outlined. It’s amazing!
This tech lets you use augment text-based instructions with visual hints, such as rough sketches and paint strokes. Draw & Delight then uses Firefly to generate high-quality vector illustrations or animations in various color palettes, style variations, poses and backgrounds.
That’s the promise of Adobe’s Project Neo—which you can sign up to test & use now! Check out the awesome sneak peek they presented at MAX:
Incorporating 3D elements into 2D designs (infographics, posters, logos or even websites) can be difficult to master, and often requires designers to learn new workflows or technical skills.
Project Neo enables designers to create 2D content by using 3D shapes without having to learn traditional 3D creation tools and methods. This technology leverages the best of 3D principles so designers can create 2D shapes with one, two or three-point perspectives easily and quickly. Designers using this technology are also able to collaborate with their stakeholders and make edits to mockups at the vector level so they can quickly make changes to projects.
I’m delighted to say that the first Firefly Vector model is now available (as a beta—feedback welcome!) in Illustrator. Just download your copy to get started. Here’s a quick tour:
And more generally, it’s just one of numerous enhancements now landing in Illustrator. Check ’em out:
I dig this simple, creative application from Nemanja Sekulic:
In the corner of my eye, our very stable (golden)doodle is happily sawing logs while I share this link to Stable Doodle, a fun little drawing tool from the folks at Stable Diffusion:
It helps produce sketch-to-image combos like this:
…or at least in what seems like every marginal hair salon. I love bite-sized little cultural insights like this:
Veteran author Deke McClelland has posted a fun 1-minute tour of the new Recolor Vectors module:
And for a deeper dive, check out his 20-minute version:
Meanwhile my color-loving colleague Hep (who also manages the venerable color.adobe.com) joined me for a live stream on Discord last Friday. It’s fun to see her spin on how best to apply various color harmonies and other techniques, including to her own beautiful illustrations:
Our first new module has just arrived 🎉, so grab your SVGs & make a path (oh my God) to the site.
From the team post:
Vector recoloring in the Firefly beta now enables you to:
- Enter detailed text descriptions to generate colors and color palette variations in seconds
- Use a drop-down menu to generate different vector styles that fit your creative needs
- Gain creative assistance and inspiration by quickly generating color options that bring your visions to life in an instant
As always, we’d love to hear what you think of the tools & what you’d like to see next!
Meta Research has introduced Animated Drawings, “A Method for Automatically Animating Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure” (as their forthcoming paper is titled).
You can try it out via their Web interface, and/or take a bit more technical dive here:
I’m of course delighted to see folks starting to use it to bring their Adobe Firefly creations to life:
Adobe prototyper Lee Brimelow has been happily distracting himself by creating delightful little creatures using Firefly, like this:
Today he joined us for a live stream on Discord (below), sharing details about his explorations so far. He also shared a Google Doc that contains details, including a number of links you can click in order to kick off the creation process. Enjoy, and please let me know what kinds of things you’d like to see us cover in future sessions.
Enjoy, if you will, this “visual symphony of everyday objects“:
A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the screen, composing a veritable visual symphony of everyday objects. The accumulation, both fascinating and dizzying, takes us on a trip through time.
Kottke notes, “More of Biet’s work can be found on his website or on Instagram.”
Check out this integration of sketch-to-image tech—and if you have ideas/requests on how you’d like to see capabilities like these get more deeply integrated into Adobe tools, lay ’em on me!
Also, it’s not in Photoshop, but as it made me think of the Photo Restoration Neural Filter in PS, check out this use of ControlNet to revive an old family photo:
Motionographer offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of these great animated vignettes:
This new capability in Stable Diffusion (think image-to-image, but far more powerful) produces some real magic. Check out what I got with some simple line art:
And check out this thread of awesome sauce:
Welcome to the meme-predicted future.
The company has announced a new mode for their Canvas painting app that turns simple brushstrokes into 360 environment maps for use in 3D apps or Omniverse. Check out this quick preview:
Heh—I can’t quite say why I found this quick demo from developer & illustrator Marc Edwards both gripping & slightly nerve-racking, but his accuracy is amazing:
Check out this fun thread of Midjourney-made illustrations:
Creative Reality Studio from D-ID (the folks behind the MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia tech that blew up a couple of years ago) can generate faces & scripts, then animate them. I find the results… interesting?
Artist & musician Ben Morin has been making some impressive pop-culture mashups, turning well-known characters into babies (using, I believe, Midjourney to combine a reference image with a prompt). Check out the results.
As I say, another day, another specialized application of algorithmic fine-tuning. Per Vice:
For $19, a service called PhotoAI will use 12-20 of your mediocre, poorly-lit selfies to generate a batch of fake photos specially tailored to the style or platform of your choosing. The results speak to an AI trend that seems to regularly jump the shark: A “LinkedIn” package will generate photos of you wearing a suit or business attire…
…while the “Tinder” setting promises to make you “the best you’ve ever looked”—which apparently means making you into an algorithmically beefed-up dudebro with sunglasses.
Meanwhile, the quality of generated faces continues to improve at a blistering pace:
✨ Trained my own model for https://t.co/ll0YGEo53Z for more photorealistic renders called
`people-diffusion`
I think by this week I can deploy it!
🤖 These are all 100% AI-generated people
Skin finally has pores now but don’t look at the hands yet please 😂 pic.twitter.com/Y6wbPz3BSS
— @levelsio (@levelsio) November 21, 2022
The Doggfather recently shared a picture of himself (rendered presumably via some Stable Diffusion/DreamBooth personalization instance)…
…thus inducing fans to reply with their own variations (click tweet above to see the thread). Among the many fun Snoop Doggs (or is it Snoops Dogg?), I’m partial to Cyberpunk…
Cyberpunk Snoop Dogg, 1,2,3 or 4? pic.twitter.com/w8BgeJBx86
— Techietree.eth/tez (@techietree_eth) November 29, 2022
…and Yodogg:
Yodogg pic.twitter.com/9qqbluoCyt
— NIDO (@OfficialNID0) November 28, 2022
Another day, another special-purpose variant of AI image generation.
A couple of years ago, MyHeritage struck a chord with the world via Deep Nostalgia, an online app that could animate the faces of one’s long-lost ancestors. In reality it could animate just about any face in a photo, but I give them tons of credit for framing the tech in a really emotionally resonant way. It offered not a random capability, but rather a magical window into one’s roots.
Now the company is licensing tech from Astria, which itself builds on Stable Diffusion & Google Research’s DreamBooth paper. Check it out:
Interestingly (perhaps only to me), it’s been hard for MyHeritage to sustain the kind of buzz generated by Deep Nostalgia. They later introduced the much more ambitious DeepStory, which lets you literally put words in your ancestors’ mouths. That seems not to have bent the overall needle in awareness, at least in the way that the earlier offering did. Let’s see how portrait generation fares.
Speaking of Bilawal, and in the vein of the PetPortrait.ai service I mentioned last week, here’s a fun little video in which he’s trained an AI model to create images of his mom’s dog. “Oreo lookin’ FESTIVE in that sweater, yo!” 🥰 I can only imagine that this kind of thing will become mainstream quickly.
I’m not sure whom to credit with this impressive work (found here), nor how exactly they made it, but—like the bespoke pet portraits site I shared yesterday—I expect to see an explosion in such purpose-oriented applications of AI imaging:
We’re at just the start of what I expect to be an explosion of hyper-specific offerings powered by AI.
For $24, PetPortrait.ai offers “40 high resolution, beautiful, one-of-a-kind portraits of your pets in a variety of styles.” They say it takes 4-6 hours and requires the following input:
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of traction this gets. The service Turn Me Royal offers more human-made offerings in a similar vein, and we delighted our son by commissioning this doge-as-Venetian-doge portrait (via an artist on Etsy) a couple of years ago:
Check out explanation below, then start creating right here.
I’ve tried it & it’s pretty slick. These guys are cooking with gas! (Also, how utterly insane would this have been to see even six months ago?! What a year, what a world.)
Man, I can’t keep up with this stuff—and that’s a great problem to have. Here are some interesting finds from just the last few days: