One of these menaces' favorite pastime is digging up bacopas at night and uprooting the monte carlo

Pinocchio shrimp. Was planning for orange neocaradinas but these will do for now until the neos become available

I've had 5 of these for less than a day and I'm already in love. Their stupid little faces and awkward hobble are making me melt

Also occasionally I hear them tumble down to the bottom and it's hilarious

Looooooook at them

I got baby bladder snails! They're smaller than a grain of sand ;-;

Yeah, about that. If you're wondering why I was so quiet these few weeks it's because I've been hyperfocused on my new aquarium. Getting skrimps today

I always find it amusing when people try to theorize on my anthros' biology using real moths as the basis. It's logical of course, and I don't mind.

But. You guys, these things have mouths as adults. Moreover, all of them have sharp mandibles. They can and will eat meat.

They are not like real moths at all besides appearance. And neither are other "races" so to speak. All of them are merely variations of the same extremely polymorphic species, they all have similar mouths and diets - they're omnivores with biting-chewing mouth apparatus.

All this to say: don't try to sex the anthros by their antennae - they vary wildly regardless of whether they belong to a male or a female. The most reliable way to immediately spot an adult male are extra 2+ feelers around their mouths that form something resembling a moustache or a sparce beard.

Do you plan on selling prints of your art at any point? You've got some really cool stuff, and it's been interesting watching you mess around with your machine learning/AI model

Nah, I don't plan to. You have my full permission to just download whatever you want and go print the stuff at the printing shop of your choice. As long as you don't sell them we're cool

Heh, good to know my mad science experiments are fun to observe

I got this slightly upsetting "ask" from someone who saw one of your images I shared and assumed it was "AI Art." I tagged you in my response: tumblr.com/futurebird/744514952775286784

I think the way you are using AI in your art is really neat. I think calling any of your work "AI Art (derogatory)" is wrong but wanted to know what you thought about it and if the particular drawing used any AI.

My guess it it's pure illustration (whatever that means, is a gradient "using AI" ?)

In any case keep making beautiful drawings however you do it, I hope you keep sharing your process --it's so helpful for all us amateurs.

And please maybe draw more ants.

Man, I wish I was skilled/experienced enough to train a model that produced images this coherent with a dataset as small as mine. Alas, Neuroslug isn't there yet. I'm trying though, gonna do some nonconventional training methods for the next iteration.

But back to the original question, that drawing is fully hand drawn, no AI touched it directly. There is some on the inspiration board though. One of the random gens produced a cute orange outfit with a shorter skirt part than I'd usually draw. I refined that further and the result is the outfit on the mom in that drawing. The moths themselves I did just bullshit together from memory without referencing any particular species.

Lately I've taken to using Neuroslug as turbo-Pinterest tailored to my specific needs. It's very neat when the outfits I'm browsing through for inspiration are already fitting for an anthro insect. In terms of reference, there's AI an almost all my reference boards now - for mood, for lighting, outfits, fluff colors etc. And I don't tag images that only use AI for reference because why? It isn't much different than just yanking something on google images for the same purpose. Whenever I do tag with "neuroslug" it means that there's substantial amount of work done directly on the image through AI generation, and not just as reference or minor superimposed textures.

I hear you about the ants, gonna need to develop a culture for them as well at some point.

Hold bb, look at bb, cherish bb

As a fan of arthropods and anthromorphs your drawings are a great reference and inspiration for anthro arthropods. Especially with how realistic it is. However something I noticed is that sometimes you place the arthropods' abdomen where a human's abdomen would be, and other times as a separate body part like an actual insect. Is it just an aesthetic thing, an indecisive thing, or something else entirely?

As far as I remember, I only ever put the abdomen behind the character like a tail once, and it was for a commission. I believe the character's name was Mellifera and the separate abdomen is just part of her established design.

Personally, I prefer putting it where a humans abdomen would be

Here's my logic basically. A feral insect has three segments - head, thorax, abdomen. In my anthros all three segments are still there, they're just elaborately fused, a separate abdomen would be a whole fourth segment, and it makes the body plan too complicated for my liking.

Like, I already struggle to put them into chairs with all those wings, a giant bulbous booty would make designing furniture for them a nightmare

Big brain idea for video workflow with neuroslug: use a hand drawn first frame for style transfer onto a whole 3d animation. Right now I'm at the mercy of what AI assumes my style is like, but that way i could give it a more direct pointer to what I want.

I'll show off what it'll look like if it doesn't fail miserably

IT LIVES IT LIIIIIIVEEEESSSSSSS

That's it, I'm gonna make my own damn cartoons. With blackjack and bugs

Yeah

It was the right call to include a full turn around on the test clip, it unearths the ~issues~ Let's see if I can keyframe the denoising strength to get rid of this. But hey, at least it doesn't look entirely like shit unlike the first attempt

Haughty

There's something indescribable about routinely finding nodes like this in workflows that are like a month old. On that note, getting the perfect control I want has been a real struggle. There's a ton of workflows for animations, but the moment you peek outside the mainstream you're basically on your own. About 50 nodes in I realized that I need to start simple and tried the basic text to video just to see how Neuroslug would fare with zero guidance on my part. Honestly expected the shapes to absolutely fall apart because AnimateDiff is trained on mostly humans. But-

It figured out how to rotate their heads. This honestly incredible, I didn't go out of my way to put all the head angles into the training data and it still figured this out. Obviously they're not perfect, but it's awesome that it can do this much on it's own. There are prettier examples too, the movement just isn't as extreme/complex. Behold my little collection

It's really surreal to be able to be able to peek into a world that I created without controlling and knowing every detail of the image/video. Brings so many ideas too. I planned to just hand draw the backgrounds for what I'm planning and leave them static, but looking at these makes me want to run some of the areas through animated diff with low denoising to introduce some instability there. Honestly loving this kind of imperfection.

Kay, back to trying control methods. One of them is bound to click at some point.

Nearly setting my computer on fire with this one, it's giving me Cycles flashbacks. At least it's working now without adding nonsense everywhere. Now let's see, what is our target quality?

Pain.

how long have you been using ai art for?

First instance of it would be approximately a year ago, with that orange fly picture. But it was a very rudimentary workflow with low res images from a free online service. I only started doing complex workflows in September when first iteration of neuroslug was trained.