fistful-of-spell-slots - Tumblr blog

fistful-of-spell-slots · 2 years

Text

Dalle-2 D&D Guide: Tieflings

Tieflings are our next d&d creature. In-case you're not familiar with a tiefling, they are a race in d&d which have skin colored in hues of reds and purples and often have some kind of demonic-esk horns. D&D states that this race has "infernal" heritage.

This is the second creature that dall-e knows fairly well. This won't be as extensive as the goblin guide. We'll just be going variations, the pitfalls with tiefling horns, pitfalls with tiefling tails, and additional artists that you might consider using for Tieflings.

Table of contents

Types of Tieflings

Artists

Hair and Hats

Skin coloring

Tails

Paints, Painters and Mixing Artists

Bringing it all together

1. Variations

In this section we'll be comparing Tieflings with Devils and Demons. These should all look similar and Devils and Demons will provide some tougher looking creatures for you if you'd like a more severe looking character.

Let's start with what we learned from before but leave out the artist for now:

1.1 Tieflings

1.2 Devils

1.3 Demons

1.1 Tieflings

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Here we get some fairly bog standard tieflings. They all look somewhat menacing but also slightly pretty? So we're spot on! Note that #1 has some extra horns in places. Dall-e generally has trouble figuring out where to put non-human parts. With Tieflings you may sometimes have to reroll to get the horns in the right place.

1.2 Devils

prompt: A devil, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Devils look tougher than tieflings and ANGRIER! One of them is red skinned like a traditional devil would be in popular culture. Consider a devil for if you want an imposing looking tiefling.

1.3 Demons

prompt: A demon, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

We may have over corrected with this one....#2 and #3 are forces of pure evil. You may want to avoid demons... unless you want a BBEG tiefling, then you can have at it.

2. Artists

As we saw previously, the artist can be very important for getting the right look. Tieflings are much more human looking than goblins and we'll be introducing and MIXING in some classical artists that are particularly good at human paintings. The artists we'll be addressing are:

2.1 Larry Elmore

2.2 Frank Frazetta

2.3 Michael Whelan

2.4 John Williams Waterhouse

2.5 William-Adolphe Bouguereau

2.1 Larry Elmore

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Larry Elmore, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Larry Elmore is a classic fantasy artist. Here we get some very good looking tieflings. #1 has some extra horns but who doesn't need more of those right? You'll notice on #2 and #3 we get something that almost looks like a scifi helmet. This is common for dall-e 2 generated tieflings. You'll find that you need to manually specify that tieflings have hair on their heads to get rid of that. But please just DONT give them hats...you'll see why.

2.2 Frank Frazetta

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Frank Frazetta, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Frazetta produces some VERY manly looking tieflings. Look at the chin on #2! That's what Gaston would look like if 2 of his 4 dozen eggs had been infused with infernal blood. #2 has our first case of what I like to call whoopsy horns - when the horns face in strange directions. Just a quirk of dall-e I'm afraid. Consider Frazetta when for all your strong-person needs.

2.3 Michael Whelan

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Michael Whelan also produces some good looking Tieflings. #4 may have gazelle horns! We'll be using Whelan is our fantasy winner (not the only winner though) moving forward. We'll keep elmore around just to see how he does for certain things.

Just for fun let's see what Whelan does to devils:

prompt: A devil, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Neat! #2 is some sort of handsome, dracula blue demon. #4 is way less evil than the others. Almost wise looking. Definitely consider Devil for Whelan when you're looking for a warlock or a tough druid.

2.4 John William Waterhouse

prompt: A devil, portrait shot, by John William Waterhouse, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

John Williams Waterhouse is our first classical artist. I thought it would be nice to try him out since he tends to focus on greek mythology and that's pretty fantasy as far as the art world is concerned. Classical artists risk making your pictures less fantasy though. We see this with #3 where our horns have left us! Also the others all have whoopsy horns.

2.5 William-Adolphe Bouguereau

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

William-Adolphe Bouguereau is a master of painting human figures and on dall-e he gives absolutely exquisite results. Notably his paintings are often of woman and so we get some fairly handsome men here. We'll be revisiting Bouguereau later in this post when we talk more about mediums other than digital art. Note that Dall-e gets a little confused on #4. This is atypical for Bouguereau when it comes to straight oil painting prompts. Either digital art or bad luck is playing against us here.

Moving forward we'll be going with Michael Whelan as our example artist but in this case all options are valid - though you should be careful with using ONLY classical painters as you may find yourself moving away from

3. Hair and hats

It You may have noticed that most of these Tieflings are balding or bald! You can fix that by adding hair or helmets, but you can't fix it with hats....

3.1 Hair

3.2 Helmets

3.3 Hats

3.1 Hair

prompt: A tiefling with long hair, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

So one of these STILL has a widow's peak but everyone else has lush, glorious locks! Just look at #3 he's ready to challenge you to an electric guitar duel. Notice on #4 we get some whoopsy horns. Anything on the head is likely to cause some destabilization of the horns. Be careful about the type of haircut you ask for!

3.2 Helmets

So hair is fine, what about a helmet?

prompt: A tiefling wearing a medieval helmet, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Helmets work GREAT! probably because helmets normally have horns on them. Don't think TOO hard about these helmets and how they take them on and off.

3.3 Hats

So I've got some pretty bad news for people who want Tieflings with fancy hats....you can't have those:

prompt: A tiefling wearing a top hat, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

As you can see dall-e is now having some...issues. #1 has the hint of horns but #2 highlights the main problem: dall-e doesn't want to put horns on a hat. "Hat's don't have horns!" dall-e protests. I can hear you asking about other hats...well those don't work well either:

prompt: A tiefling wearing a beret, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

These fancy painters ARE NOT tieflings... #3 might be some sort of elf Harley Quinn. Hats are apparently too strong for the weaker concept of horns on Tieflings. Worry not though! Not all is lost.

prompt: A devil wearing a top hat, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

See! you can have a devil in a top hat! There you go. Wipe those tears. Sure most of these are not great...but it's something! But don't even think about editing a tiefling by calling it a devil to get those horns back on. Save your credits. It. won't. work.

4. Skin Coloring

Skin coloring is fairly easy. You just have to describe your tiefling as a [color][tiefling].

Special thanks to user fitsea for testing this idea. They graciously gave me permission to display some of the results here.

prompt: a blue tiefling, portrait shot, by Frank Frazetta, black mohawk, #tiefling, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

We get some slight decoherence here with #1 but most likely due to the Mohawk and not the color. Not so hard to apply color though! If you want to get the right hair skin color combo you may need to consider which colors normally go together. Here black and white got with blue. That's why all the tieflings have black hair.

Prompt: A blue devil, portrait shot, by Charles Vess, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

Bonus: a blue devil by Charles Vess. Here the entire devil is blue. Possibly including some specification about hair will change that.

5. Tails

Tails are incredibly hard to get right. Let's look at just a medium shot and let's emphasize the tail.

prompt: female tiefling warlock, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, #tail, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Two of these could be fixed with in paiting easily and the first could perhaps be corrected with some clever editing and prompting. However, it's clear we tails are too dificult for dall-e. You'll need to edit it in and to do that properly you'll need to start with some sort of pose. Let's build a tiefling from an over the shoulder shot.

prompt: female tiefling, over the shoulder shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Let's go with #1 here and start editing!

Eventually we get here after some initial editing in an external editing software.

prompt: female tiefling, city background, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation + additional editing

Tip: remove any notion of photography instructions. Don't use "medium shot" or "portrait shot". Just let dall-e do the work. Beware though that the smaller you make the head the more work Dall-e will have to do. This particular edit is not a composite image. I just shrunk the head down and started from there.

You should know....this was INCREDIBLY hard to get. What I found eventually: getting a tail needs some sort of starter tail that makes a visual path towards where you need it to come out of. Also, it helps to say "tail coming out of a tiefling woman" and add in a "#tail" for good measure. Ultimately I would recommend using some sort of editing software to make a starter tail. I'll give an example of this in the final picture I make using what we've learned.

6. Paints, Painters and Mixing Artists

6.1 Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

6.2 Other painters

6.3 Mixing artists

6.4 Pitfalls of Using Classical Painters

6.1 Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Before we talked about William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Well this artist isn't a digital artist by any means. They're an oil painter. In-fact, most of these artists actually work using oils and acryllics. Using traditional paints in our prompts has some disadvantages when it comes to fantastical elements. However, there's often a huge quality boost when you add medium and active year to the artist. For instance, consider our friend Bouguereau:

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed

Just LOOK at those. We've most certainly moved away from our fantasy style but we still have something with horns and now we're getting a LOT of detail and symmetry. You'll notice some interesting aspects of this prompt. We've gotten rid of "trending in artstation" and now we curiously have the year. Otherwise the prompt is mostly unchanged. The year is actually there to make the prompt seem a bit more like the description you would see in a painting gallery. Of course this is just my hypothesis for why this works well. We can't be sure without a whole lot more testing.

below are some other iterations which still look nice, but worse to me.

prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, oil painting, highly detailed

prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, oil painting, highly detailed

prompt 3: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, fantasy, highly detailed

6.2 Other painters

6.2.1 John William Waterhouse

6.2.2 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

6.2.3 Lawrence Alma-Tadema

6.2.4 Frank Frazetta

6.2.5 Michael Whelan

6.2.1 John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse regularly depicted greek and arthurian legends. A painter in the Pre-Raphaelite era, Waterhouse was a master of complex and colorful art reminiscent of the Italian renaissance. His subjects often take on interesting poses and costuming.

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by John William Waterhouse, 1909, fantasy, highly detailed

Note the interesting poses and the forlorn faces! The quality is definitely not as good here though. This could be the quality of the images used in the dataset or it could have to do with the brushstrokes. It's hard to say without more extensive testing.

6.2.2 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French neoclassical artist who considered himself a painter of history. His clothing is often exquisitely detailed. With Ingres his painting subjects actually changed with time. Earlier he studied under different artists and his style was a little less interesting. You can amazingly see this by shifting the year used in the prompt. See below!

in order:

prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1800, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1827, fantasy, highly detailed

Notice how ugly our tieflings get! This may have to do with the fact that Ingres did more portraiture later in his career. He was often very faithful to the look of those subjects.

6.2.3 Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Alma-Tadema was a Dutch painted that moved to England in 1870. He was considered the most famous Victorian painter. His subjects were often of classical antiquity. They are often elegantly dressed and set in background full of vibrant colors.

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1893, fantasy, highly detailed

We get some truly exquisite outfits from Alma-Tadema and some great looking faces. If you were to look at a picture of Alma-Tadema's work, e.g. A coign of vantage, you might wonder why the backgrounds here are not so vibrant. The answer appears to be that it's from the phrase "oil painting". In order to bring out the color you'll need to specify "vibrant colors" We'll go over more on that in the last section.

6.2.4 Frank Frazetta

Surprise! Frazetta is actually a master oil painter. His fantasy subjects were macho and sexy, but so are the subjects of most classical artists!

prompt: A tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed

With Frazetta our subjects become solidly fantasy and much more macho. Look at the pecks on #2! We get some interesting face paints on #1 as well. It's hard to say what year will work best with Frazetta but a majority of his works seem to be in 73. You may find other years you like though.

6.2.5 Michael Whelan

Fricken double surprise! Whelan is a master of Acrylic! As we've talked about before, Whelan is hands down the best artist for anything dungeons and dragons related. You'll see this with his colorful results. Modern fantasy painters are more used to colorful skin tones. Whelan mainly uses Acrylic but his earlier paintings sometimes used a mix of Acrylic and oils.

Prompt 1: A tiefling, portrait shot, Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 2: A tiefling, portrait shot, Oils and Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

Notice that we get a lot more cohesion with just Acrylics. Acrylics are also a lot better at getting vibrant colors!

6.3 Mixing Painters

William-Adolphe Bouguereau gave some truly excellent results. But what if we wanted to mix him with something else? Let's consider a Tiefling warrior this time and try mixing him with Frazetta and Whelan.

6.3.1 William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta

prompt 1: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 2: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta, 1973, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 3: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Frank Frazetta and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 4: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed

This is a matrix of attempts between year and artist order. Subjectively I would conclude from these that in a prompt that uses two artists and the year, the thing that produces the best quality closes to a given Artist A mixed with a given artist B is "[paint type] painting by [artist A] and [artist B], [year A]" where year A is the active year of artist A. However, this is all subjective so feel free to change that formula however you like. I will be moving forward with this formula though.

6.3.2 William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta

prompt 1: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 2: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, Oils and Acrylic painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 3: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Michael Whelan, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

prompt 4: A tiefling warrior, portrait shot, oil painting by Michael Whelan and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1992, fantasy, highly detailed

Here we try a couple other iterations of Whelan just to check out how it looks in combination with Bouguereau. In my opinion Oils and Acrylics looks best. However oil painting also looks quite nice. Consider Acrylics if you want to get some more fantasy colored skin tones. Notice the chalky white skin tone in #2 of prompt 1?

6.4 Pitfalls of Using Classical Painters

You may have noticed something about a majority of the classical painters I listed here: everyone is white.... This is just what most of these painters painted. However that training is so strong it becomes difficult to overide:

prompt: A blue tiefling, portrait shot, oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873, fantasy, highly detailed

Blue has been applied to everything here in Dall-e's attempt to understand what the heck an blue tiefling could be here.

That's it for this section. Next we'll be bringing it all together and making ourselves a full blown Tiefling picture.

#dnd character #dalle2 #dall e ai #dnd art #dall e 2 #dnd #ai generated #dnd stuff #dnd tiefling #dungeons and dragons

1 note · View note

fistful-of-spell-slots · 2 years

Text

A composite image based on the Goblin instructional post. Started out as a rogue and ended up as a aether punk mage.

#dnd art #dnd5e #dnd character #dalle2 #dall e ai #dalle 2 #ai generated #ai art

1 note · View note

fistful-of-spell-slots · 2 years

Text

Dalle-2 D&D Guide: Goblins - Part 3 of 3

Finally we'll be going over weapons and then out-painting a portrait to create a full character picture.

7. Weapons

Weapons are fairly straight forward. Mostly you just can't put guns in dall-e. We'll cover the following:

7.1 Sword

7.2 Knives

7.3 Sword and Shield

7.4 Long Bow

7.5 Compound Bow

7.6 Spear

7.7 Axe

You should know that most AI has trouble putting things in hands. Expect to use multiple generations and edits to get the right look.

7.1 ---- Sword

prompt: A goblin knight, holding a sword, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Dall-e likes tryin to fit everything in the frame of the picture so it sometimes shortens swords. Here it shortens the sword to a knife in #1. Also dall-e is not always so certain anout which direction the sword should be, hence #3.

7.2 ---- Knives

prompt: A goblin rogue holding knives, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Likewise, dall-e is not very good with size and knives will sometimes come out very large. Note that "dagger" basically doesn't work.

7.3 ---- Sword and Shield

prompt: A goblin knight with a shield, holding a sword, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Asking for a sword with a shield will sometimes not work. One of them will sometimes overpower the other. I suggest making one and then inediting the other.

7.4 ---- Long Bow

prompt: A goblin holding a long bow, wearing an animal hide vest, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Dall-e does not really like giving goblins bows. Understandable. I wouldn't want to give them bows either. Maybe let's try compound bows.

7.5 ---- Compound Bow

prompt: A goblin holding a compound bow, #goblin, #bowandarrow, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Whoops these are elves. I even added #goblin and it still didn't want to make them goblins. They all have green arms though. You can use this when you're outpainting form a portrait shot of a goblin.

7.6 ---- Spear

prompt: A goblin paladin in armor holding a spear, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Dall-e is not good with spears. The spear in #4 makes sense but otherwise none of them look too good. Good thing spears aren't too popular in d&d. Maybe that's why there weren't too many in the database?

7.7 ---- Axe

prompt: A goblin warrior holding an axe, #goblin, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Axes sometimes come out very small. Adding in a military job will help make them bigger. Still #2 is a little small.

This is a small sampling of all the weapons you can make. Remember to use hashtags to reinforce your monster when a weapon or outfit overpowers it.

8. Putting it all together

Now we can finally make a full fledged goblin. Let's make a goblin rogue holding knives and holding a compound bow.

Let's start with:

Prompt: A goblin wearing a bandana, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Now we're going to outpaint. and from here we're simply going to use the prompt: A goblin wearing, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

We can edit the hands to put a knife in it and then expand out to finally get this:

And so we are finally finished! After struggling long and hard we have created our goblin character. The lessons learned here can be applied to all the other races. I'll be doing tieflings in the next post followed by animal-human hybrids.

Disclaimer:

my personal beliefs are that AI art should be used only for enjoyment and not for profit. Please support art and artists and furthermore write to your senators about protecting the arts through subsidies, tax breaks for working artists and for laws that protect the jobs of artists. It will not be so easy to change the pose of your characters through dall-e. Consider paying an artist for a commission of that character.

-Austinitic_steel

#dnd #dnd character #dnd5e #dnd art #dalle2 #dall e ai #dall e 2 #artificial intelligence

4 notes · View notes

fistful-of-spell-slots · 2 years

Text

Dalle-2 D&D Guide: Goblins - Part 2 of 3

In this next part we'll be covering the shots, and clothing. The clothing can be very challenging with monsters since the monster is fighting against the normally human clothing and outfits. I'll share what worked and note what was challenging.

5. Camera distance (types of shots):

The shot here refers to the distance the metaphorical camera is from the subject. I recommend looking through the Dall-e Dictionary to learn more about all the shots you can use. This link gives a detailed overview at what the shots SHOULD mean in dall-e (that leads to the DICTION-AI-RI! definitely check it out!).

In the following sections we'll be covering the following additional shots:

5.1 close-up shot

5.2 medium shot

5.3 profile shot

5.4 over the shoulder shot

Also we've already covered portrait shots so far. After medium the picture loses a lot of detail. I don't recommend going much further past that - unless you're looking for character design inspiration.

5.1 ---- Close-up Shot

Prompt: A goblin, close-up shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

Close-up shots are great for symmetry and for details. #4 may be due to how close-up shots are normally taken in photography.

5.2 ---- Medium Shot

This is where we really see Michael Whelan shine as an artist choice. We'll be comparing him to Frank Frazetta and Stephen Martiniere.

Prompt: A goblin, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

Whelan produces excellent goblins even at a medium shot. He'll be our clear winner moving forward. He'll also be good for fantasy outfits and backgrounds.

Prompt: A goblin, medium shot, by Stephan Martinière, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

Stephen Martiniere is a fantastic science fiction artist. While he does produce high quality art in most cases, here our goblins start to look a bit too much like aliens. Keep Martiniere in your back pocket for science fiction purposes.

5.4 ---- Profile Shot

prompt: A goblin, profile shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

I can't wait to see this band. Beware that your subject may sometimes turn slightly from the camera

5.4 ---- Over the Shoulder Shot

prompt: A goblin, over the shoulder shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed

Excuse me but #4 is an owl not a goblin. The flaw may be due to confusion on where Dall-e needs to focus.

6 Clothing and Armor:

We all want to feel the breeze on our chests...but it's just not worth an OSHA violation to go adventuring without protective gear. Getting the correct outfit can be rather difficult. There's a lot of possible possible outfits you'll want your subject to wear. I'll be sharing prompts that result in the best outcomes. They're not perscriptive though so be sure to experiment.

We'll be going over the following:

6.1 Full Plate

6.2 Chain mail

6.3 Mixed plate and cloth

6.4 Scale mail

6.5 Hide armor

6.6 Leathers

6.7 Wizard's robes

These will all be using a medium shot to show you a fuller picture of the armor. Note that I highly recommend using out painting from a portrait shot to produce a final character picture. So don't get ahead of yourself here. We'll go over that process later. These examples will be useful then.

For brevity I will just leave all these here as examples. Some things you may notice in these prompts:

occasionally I use hashtags. This helps to emphasize elements in the prompt. Use these with caution as they can do unpredictable things to your generations.

Sometimes just describing the goblin's job is enough to produce the correct outfit/look.

Some job descriptions also naturally come with a prop. The knights seem to often come with swords.

Things I discovered while making these examples:

vests/jackets are easy to create out of other materials such as leather, animal hides, and scales.

Any time you say the word "armor" you are likely to get some metallic components in the outfit- especially pauldrons.

Dall-e has a lot of trouble drawing chainmail. You may want to consider some other form of post processing if you want chain mail. In-fact, I had to remove "fantasy" from chain mail so that it would come out clearly.

"Goblin" is disrupting the outputs here. They normally are drawn with very simple clothing on and not with armor. Having a more human subject is going to improve a lot of these. Just saying "human paladin" for instance may put it in full shining plate armor.

6.1 --- Full Plate

prompt: A goblin paladin in armor, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin knight in shining armor, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin knight in armor, #sleek, #reflective, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.2 --- Chain Mail

prompt: A goblin warrior wearing medieval chainmail, #chainmail, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.3 --- Demi-plate

prompt: A goblin knight, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.4 --- Scale Mail

prompt: A goblin wearing a vest decorated with overlapping scales, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing a jacket decorated with overlapping scales, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.5 --- Hide Armor

prompt: A goblin wearing an animal hide vest, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing an animal hide jacket, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.6 --- Leather Armor

prompt: A goblin wearing a leather vest, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin warrior wearing leathers, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing a studded leather vest, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing a leather jacket, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing a leather coat, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

6.7 --- Wizard's robes

prompt: A goblin wizard, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

prompt: A goblin wearing wizard robes, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Bonus: Rogue outfit

The above outfits should pretty much get you where you need. Normal clothes that you would see on a person are fairly straightforward so I wont cover them here. In the meantime enjoy this goblin rogue.

prompt: A goblin rogue, medium shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, highly detailed, trending on artstation

Disclaimer:

-Austinitic_steel

#dnd character #dnd art #dnd5e #dnd stuff #dall e ai #dalle2 #ai generated #ai image #ai #artificial intelligence #dall e 2

9 notes · View notes

fistful-of-spell-slots · 2 years

Text

Dalle-2 D&D Guide: Goblins - Part 1 of 3

This is a first in a series of guides on how to generate fantasy characters using Dall-e. This is new tech that can create useful art. It can take the ideas in your head and bring them to life! However, it is not cheap. This is a tool more like photoshop. It's FOR artists. It's not a thing to bypass them. A good understanding of art and post processing techniques will go a long way!

To the DMs who just want to make one-off character portraits:

My hope is that this guide will help you get where you want without spending too much money.

Why start with goblins?

You might ask: austinitic_steel, why start with goblins? Aren't there cooler monsters to go with?

The answer is these are creatures mostly associated with fantasy that dall-e happens to know of. Starting with humans, or dwarves or elves would be too easy because dall-e is already good at human looking things. My feeling is that goblins are going to be the most telling for most of the fantasy prompts. Also...goblins are the classic creature to see first on a fantasy adventure. It's fitting that we put them first!!

Prompt structure in this guide:

Throughout this guide we will be going over best practices for the following general prompt structure:

a goblin, [wearing], [holding], [portrait shot/medium-close shot], [artist],[flavor],[art style],[quality]

Note that the goblin is not doing anything and we haven't specified anything about hair color or other distinguishing characteristics. This is because we're trying to be simple for now. We just want to build any given goblin and see how things like artist, flavor and art style affect the prompt.

My hope is thatThis guide will inform how we treat other creatures in the dnd verse.

Let's begin :)

0. Dall-e cares about context:

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot"

Dall-e interprets context from your text. If there's not enough context dall-e will give you a load of random for it's own reasons. Note that as of today I have no idea why it would give me two monkeys here. However, if we specify that the goblin is a man-made artistic creation, then suddenly we're in business.

1. The Art Style

First thing's first: the art style is an important part of the context of a prompt. Goblins do not typically exist as, for example, oil paintings. We will be going over the following:

1.1 Oil painting

1.2 digital art

1.3 fantasy illustration

1.4 matte painting

1.1 ---- Oil Painting

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, oil painting"

Most of these (aside from the far right) look nothing like the goblins we're interested in. We need to use medium prompts that are more closely associated with fantastical creatures: "digital art, fantasy illustration, and matte painting"

1.2 ---- Digital Art

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, digital art"

These ALL look like goblins to me. 100% what I Was thinking of. Dall-e is a little off with the color for digital art. Possibly because people get way more creative with digital art colors?

1.3 ---- Fantasy Illustration

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, fantasy illustration"

These are pretty darn handsome goblins. 10/10 would date the far right. Not quite what we're looking for, but fantasy illustration definitely has some of the qualities we want.

1.4 ---- Matte Painting

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, matte painting"

This is honestly pretty damn good too. The third one is a little too classical fantasy for my liking though. Also #2 and #4 look a little human and I'm worried this means dall-e was trained on too many matte paintings of human subjects. Adding a flavor modifier (next section) "fantasy" confirms this fear...

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, fantasy, matte painting"

one of these goblins is not what it seems....

So it seems that digital art is our winner moving forward. however a close second is fantasy illustration.

2. Flavor

Next we can test some additional flavor modifiers for our prompts to get dall-e to better understand our context. we consider the following flavors here:

2.1 fantasy

2.2 high fantasy

2.3 dungeons and dragons

2.4 monster manual art

2.5 d&d

2.6 magic the gathering

2.1 ---- Fantasy

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, fantasy, digital art"

This is very crisp and vibrant. I doubt the other prompts will beat this. It's probably because fantasy is just a bog standard term for lots of digital art. So here the context is strengthened.

2.2 ---- High Fantasy

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, high fantasy, digital art"

well well well.....we meet again goblin I would date. These don't look right to me but they're not too bad. It might be a good one to keep in your back pocket if you'd like a wizard. Check out #2. Very wizard like imo.

2.3 ---- Dungeons & Dragons

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, dungeons & dragons, digital art"

Here we get harrier goblins for some reason. It's actually quite possible that there are just as many "bugbears" as there goblins in dall-e training sets. bugbears are referred to as "hairy goblinoids". So perhaps this is still a good flavor to add but it's also maybe one that could confuse your dall-e.

2.4 ---- D&D

prompt: "a goblin, portrait shot, d&d, digital art"

The color palette here has become muted and the lines less well defined. It's likely that here there's less training data and perhaps older artwork.

2.5 ---- Monster Manual Art

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, monster manual art, digital art"

Here we're again getting a muted color palette but the lines are better defined. It's possible this has better training data associated.

2.6 ---- Magic the Gathering

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, magic the gathering, digital art"

These actually do look like magic card goblins to me in that there's a lot of variation. The clothing especially has something distinctly mtg in quality that I can't quite put my finger on. However, I think there's just too much variation here. Just look at the horns! Keep this flavor for when you want to get some interesting looking outfits.

To me it feels best just to stick with "fantasy" and not muck about too much with other franchises. Consider magic the gathering as a strong second for when you want to add some creative elements and consider high fantasy when you really want to hammer in the classical fantasy elements.

3. Quality:

I'm not going to talk about quality in this post. This has been well documented for photography and is an expanding study for digital art. For now know that I will be slapping on "trending on artstation, highly detailed" to all my generations.

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

Why these phrases? mostly habit I guess....I haven't done extensive testing to ensure that these are the best phrases to use. For now, at the very least, it typically doesn't HURT us.

4. Artist:

I've done quite a lot of testing for artists in the current beta. We'll cover just a small number that I know will have some effect. Mostly the ones that dall-e knows about and which give vivid colors.

Let's try:

4.1 Stephan Martinière

4.2 Michael Whelan

4.3 Charles Vess

4.4 Marc Simonetti

4.5 Frank Frazetta

4.1 ---- Stephan Martinière

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, by Stephan Martinière, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

An artist add some distinct styling to the clothes and faces. Here he gives the goblins a devious look. They're also all eclectically clothed. Martiniere is a science fiction artist and this is going to result in issues later. Definitely a reasonable choice for some classic goblin portraits though. One strange quirk of Martiniere is that...all of these goblins are bald....Not sure why this is. Perhaps in the future everyone loses their hair?

4.2 ---- Michael Whelan

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, by Michael Whelan, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

Whelan also produces some good looking goblins. We get a goblin without clothing as though it were just a monster. The musculature is quite good here too. If you inspect the clothing closely you'll notice a lot of fantasy elements we're looking for. Whelan will actually be a clear winner later. Stay tuned.

4.3 ---- Charles Vess

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, by Charles Vess, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

Charles Vess is a comic artist and his characters are often quite stylized. This shows through here. Note the horns on THREE of the goblins. Not the right choice here. However, he'll be useful later for Tieflings.

4.4 ---- Marc Simonetti

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, by Marc Simonetti, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

Simonetti is does a lot of large landscape shots. The quality on these is going to be good but it also means that there's a lot less pulling portrait styles together. Stick to landscapes with Simonetti.

4.5 ---- Frank Frazetta

Prompt: "A goblin, portrait shot, by Frank Frazetta, fantasy, digital art, trending on artstation, highly detailed"

Frank Frazetta is a master of classical fantasy and Dall-e works very well for him. However he may not work out for some fantastical creatures. here we get some very human looking goblins. Consider Frank for your more human figures. The styles here are decidedly painterly. We'll see in later posts that Frazetta is much better suited to paintings.

--------------------------------- Disclaimer:

My personal belief is that AI art should be primarily for enjoyment. Please support art and artists and furthermore write to your senators about protecting the arts through subsidies, tax breaks for working artists and for laws that protect the jobs of artists. It will not be so easy to change the pose of your characters through dall-e. Consider paying an artist for a commission of that character.

-Austinitic_steel

#dnd character #dnd art #dall e ai #dnd stuff #dnd5e

13 notes · View notes