Character Portraits and Where to Find Them

[TheFred]

On 7/16/2023 at 4:01 PM, leons1701 said:

I used to be able to find good character portraits with a google search, not any more because you get 50-75% ai generated garbage for most searches. And lest someone feel compelled to jump to the defense of AI "art", I'm talking stuff you can easily tell is AI from a thumbnail, weird proportions, weapons (presumably, if they aren't supposed to be weapons, I'm even MORE disturbed) out of some non-Euclidean eldritch realm, both eyes looking out of the same side of a helmet with a nasal, disjointed styles, etc. Absolute useless junk.

I for one have always supported our coming AI overlords, but right now it's still in a really weird place. Making actually good art with AI is still really hard but suddenly there's a heck of a lot of it out there, probably because the barrier to entry is so much lower. I even saw an ad for a site where you could buy AI-generated wallpapers... I never saw ads for sites offering to sell me regular wallpapers, why would I be more willing to pay money just because it's AI-generated? It's a fad, basically. Like anything, it's generated a lot of light and noise, there's already been a bit of a backlash, then eventually it will settle down and we'll eventually end up with actually good AI that's better than humans at everything.

[matt_s]

For more grounded games especially with human / humanlike characters, public domain art from Smithsonian or other online collections can work quite well I've found. The classic modern fantasy character portraits can tend to be a bit "gaudy" if that's the right word for that.

[Shozurei]

I used to use Hero Machine to mix and match stuff until I found something I liked and used that as a reference to commission a drawing. Sadly, with Adobe Flash no longer supported, that won't work any more. I've occasionally use Hero Forge, but that's a bit limited in hair/hat combos. I tried an AI generator once and found something for a reference pic. .....it wasn't usable on its own.....