The following concept art comes directly from the current pipeline, but we haven't yet gotten it fully stable for animation. It's way closer than it was, but in the mean time, here are some frame grabs from the AI layers in progress.
It's been a while since I posted art frames. Every day new shots are developed, thousands of them, and at some point I'll make a best of gallery, but for now here are just some picked out from a single night of production.
I've been paying for the advanced model and its a lot less frustrating.As a language model, I cannot condone the use of the word "elegant"
I've just started saying this in real life now, the repetition got to me.
Thanks, It's a ton of work every day, but It's been kind of an amazing experience the last few months, just watching a whole new world of possibilities open up. I've actually developed it a lot further already, in case you missed the videos on that. I put out so many that I can't imagine any one person has the time to watch them all. Since it might be of general interest to people who stumble across this thread, here's a little collection of videos relevant to my progress bridging UE5 into a heavily modded stable diffusion. The video "Hybrid" is the one where the real breakthrough took place. There's thousands of hours of work to be done still on just the pipeline and art style, I'm not fully satisfied with it yet, but the system is now working, so I'm building the mini project "The Labyrinth" in it's final form now, in an effort to get it shipped out so I can start the actual story of Save Point, which I'm way more excited about.Very interesting research Nate. Its all very consistent. Looking forward on how you gonna develop it further.
Sort of, the solution could be better. Ultimately, I've solved everything on some level. The huge deal is that almost everything needs to be solved at full automation level. So I can make that fire animate photorealistic, if I stop and work on one scene for an hour. Can't do a branching film with 10s of thousands of scenes manually, so I have to have a tech end solution that works. One is coming though, so I'm just bulldozing ahead for now, and when the fixed module is available, I'll swap it in and rerun all the sequences.those last two frames - did you figure out how to animate the fire?
Thanks for the feedback! I'm really happy to finally have the visual quality of the pipeline catching up to my imagination. I'd been trying to do transparent glass people for months, and finally got it working with some of the recent pipeline improvements. The human characters are almost ready for primetime, once the animation node is upgraded enough to accomplish more complex behavior.Some impressions:
The "papercuts". Cool, but, for some reason, they freak me out a little--the bone color, the organic-like rococo gee-gaws. Anyway, onward.
Forrest tigers, deer, and robots. Unique, beautiful, complex and colorful. I begin to imagine a story. What kind of forrest is this? What kinds of creatures are they? Maybe they watch, observe, report on the astronauts.
The creature in the flowing white robes. A little like a dementor, but since it is white, perhaps the opposite. Great image and, especially I think, great composition.
The space ship. Did you design this, Nate? I, by now, have seen lots and lots of space ship interiors, but never one quite like this. I like it. The circles and ovals a little classic retro sci-fI.
The castle--reminds me of a kind of comic-booky image, but good.
The mall -- I had a scene, a flashback in a little thing where a guy has a breakdown in a futuristic mall. It might look something like this. Crowded, complex, claustrophobic. It just needs a soundtrack, Muzak, probably "Spanish Flea" .
The Astronauts in the foggy deserted town. Ok. These look great. And there is a story here, somewhere, An away mission into the Twilight Zone.
The pod-people. Nice design. Definitely gives the feeling of something bad going on here.
The elephants in the room. In the idiom they are meant to represent something too obvious to be ignored, but that is being ignored, for some reason, anyway. But here, they are seemingly being ignored because they are innocuous, maybe supposed to be there after all. I can see this image having some meme potential. Various elephants, various rooms, not being ignored because they represent something too difficult to talk about, but for some other reason--maybe they're service animals, bell-hops, I don't know, lol. Anyway.
The astronauts, helmets off, their faces. These are AI faces? Wow. Alive, expressive, with age and temperament appropriate creases, lines, and also with age and temperament appropriate absences of creases and lines. Realistic, and yet somehow, in some small way, still "Other." And the lighting in these is so bright and different from the others that it seems to tell some kind of, some part of, a story.
Anyway, also, nice glowey monkey, nice foggy space ship, nice all around. Bits of surrealism, magic realism, and hyper realism, and I wonder: could these three things somehow, logically, inhabit one story?