Greetings, artists from all worlds and all realities!
Today, I thought I'd share with you a creation from a while back. I hope you like it!
It was made using my custom build of Disco Diffusion, photo-manipulation and digital drawing through Gimp and Inkscape, and post editing/composition in darktable.
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This was probably the hardest creation I've ever done, when it comes to photobashing applied to AI generated art.
I'm not 100% satisfied with it (at all), especially for the face part, but I needed it out and done!
I really wanted to make some infected cybernetic zombies, so I gave it a spin, but it's much tougher than I thought to work with humanoids and faces!
Process here was a little trickier:
I (poorly) drew the shape of that portrait in Gimp, to give the position of the bust, the eyes, and the color scheme. Once that was done, I fed it into Stable Diffusion and generated a BUNCH of variations. Most of them looked crap, but one was all I needed.
I took that one out, re-imported it into Gimp for some color changes, some drawing, some highlightings, added some details here and there, did some composition... Then sliced it into 7 slices (That seems to be my new go to number now) and span that into my Disco Diffusion!
Basically, this took a LONG time.
Working on faces, humanoid faces mostly, is a PAIN. I tried 8 different models inside of Disco Diffusion, through multiple combinations of them together or independently. I ended up with WAY too many slices, and I knew the stitching part was going to be an absolute nightmare.
Despite it all, I divided it all into different categories -my top-lefts, top-rights, bottom-rights, bottom-lefts, center-top, center, and center-bottoms- and started doing a pre-stitch (basically) of each category separately.
This. Was. Pain.
I've learned a lot!
About photobashing, about facial structure, about color matching... I don't feel satisfied when I look at the final result, but I spent WAY too much time on this, so it was time to let go. I still have a long way to go when it comes to bashing different slices together at the end of the rendering process, and to keep facial integrity and coherence in what I do.