You are absolutely right regarding mini-cities. I have a few settings that may solve this. I will launch a new generation for it today.
AVALON and PROMITOR will require this tweak and can share the same settings.
For Umbra i had to comeup with totally new settings and prompts, and still the generations produce artifacts 3 out of 5 times. But thats just a limitation we have to deal with.
Boucher faced totally new issues with lakes. I havent solved this yet, but almost all generations are irrelevant. I will post most adequate ones below.
Having looked at these, I suspect that it’s a mistake to go all in on man-made elements. The eye is probably more forgiving of weird looking clouds or trees than weird-looking buildings and vehicles. Also, the majority of planets are currently uninhabited, so the painting generation will have to be mostly plain landscapes for those anyway. At most there would be a couple of astronauts, or a single landing craft, but a lot of planets could even do without that.
Yeah i agree. The shapes of buildings we can change by selecting a different author that painted in blocky shapes, or round shapes, etc. Its a whole art study.
But i would recommend going away from pure scientific scenery of the planet, to avoid too many look-alikes. I would prefer art be made as colorful as No Mans Sky procedural generations. So throw some prompts at me with planet names, i will tweak them and post some results. Still trying to solve BOUCHER.
So out of more than 200 BATCH18 Boucher images, i have selected those with least artifacts.
None of them are perfect. All of them have these 3 issues:
1.Weird spaceship forms
2.Weird reflections, turning water into sky
3.Perspective issues with micro-cities in the front and macro-cities in the back
Below images are experimental with alot of different settings.
Take your time to analyse them, let me know the NUMBER (mouse over the image to see it) which are most adequate, and i will run more with the same settings and seed number.
Take your time to analyse them as if they are in a gallery.
Beauty of this is realized if you look at one for some time, and then rest a while before coming back for another. Looking at too many at once blurs your eyes and they lose their uniquness, so opinion becomes quite biased.
I will try to avoid having such long galleries in the future, but my work schedule forced it unfortunatelly. Had literally no time this week.
It seems that this AI will never get water looking right. I doubt it understands the concept of reflections. It might do better on a watery world without any machinery or buildings though, depending on what source images it works from.
Anyway, originally I was hoping that we could generate thousands of images this way, for all the planets, but having seen these latest ones I think it’s clear that this could never be a “fire and forget” type process where we can trust the AI to come up with something decent. Instead, it would have to be done with manual selection from a group of images that have had their input strings and settings tweaked for each planet.
If this goes into the game, there would be an image rectangle on the planet info screen, called “Latest survey image” or similar, which showed the picture. If we hadn’t yet chosen an image for that planet (as would be the case for most of them) there would be some text that says “Survey image not available” instead.
Below are the ones I like so far, and some suggestions for planets that I think they evoke. It’s probably getting close to the point where we should ask the devs if they have any interest in this concept. If they say “There is no way we will ever put these in the game” then, well, it’s been fun.
I’d leave those astronauts in. They’re not too bad, and the goal here is to get publicity for the game, so having some slight weirdness in one or two of the images will create a talking point.
Hey sorry for the late reply We are quite impressed with what you (and these AI systems) came up with. We discussed internally if we should use artworks like these. For now, we won’t add them to the game, as they would break the stylized, expert-user user interface we have.
We do think that the images might contribute to the lore though! In the official handbook we have a section about the lore of the game. This section is work-in-progress and open for anyone to contribute. I think it could be a nice addition to add a few major planets and add these artworks to them. What do you think?
Sure, just let the lore writers know of this and we can work it out with them
If you desire more stylized art, giving an example would help. I might be able to tweak the settings to fit the current UI.
We are quite impressed with what you (and these AI systems) came up with. We discussed internally if we should use artworks like these. For now, we won’t add them to the game, as they would break the stylized, expert-user user interface we have.