So I leveled up in StableDiffusion today, and I want to show that off. I’ll get back to this fascinating fruit question, I promise, but first: Art time!

In order to generate card art for Flonk‘s moves, I need, well, Flonk. He’s hard to animate because he’s a creature type I made up. AI is very good at goblins. You ask it to make a goblin full of mischief, and StableDiffusion is all “I got your goblin right here, boss,” and apparently it does have goblins right here. AI is pretty lousy at things that are not well defined subjects, because, well, that’s what it trained on. If you ask it for a worm bodied, fish jawed monster.. you’re going to get something. Just maybe not the something you were hoping to see.

When I last worked on this, I had a pretty good version of Flonk’s head. What I didn’t have was the rest of his body. And that is a problem because he has a body.

I learned something pretty awesome today: You can ask StableDiffusion to extend an image in a process called Outpainting. Nice thing is, it doesn’t actually take all that much time, which is good, because despite the fact that it should simply build on what it sees and go from there, it generates a lot of.. hallucinations. “Take this image and then rub ether all over your face and see what you come up with. Toodles!”

I found it most useful to only extend in one direction at a time and have it run about 9 images per batch. This allowed me to gawp at at least 8 of them and pick the least deranged one to iterate upon. Once I extended out the body enough to see the whole thing, I then fed it back into Img2Img to make something more unified out of it.

So the end result of these extensions was in need of some deletion (namely that skeleton demon thing riding Flonk’s back) but the basic shape was there. Now it was simply a matter of fixing the weird butt legs and his illogical antennae. Stable Diffusion really seems to like butt legs; even if your species of arthropod doesn’t have a butt, legs do belong under your butt. Or on it. Or through it. Meh.

I’m still working on this, obviously but getting very close. Oh and raspberries, mangoes, grapes, mulberries and granadillas.