One of my favorite kinds of images to create with Stable Diffusion are those involving anthropomorphic cats. Here’s a cat as an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. It required a lot of inpainting for the star field and the Earth’s curvature. SD 1.5 models often have trouble with keeping track of a line, of say a table or in this case a celestial object, bisected by a foreground subject. The final image here isn’t perfect but it was as good enough for me.
I created this nightmare image of a skeletal being with glowing eyes in a post-apocalyptic landscape using Stable Diffusion and A1111 earlier this year. It required very little prompting to come up with this frightening picture.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing some of the images that I have created using Stable Diffusion, an opensource generative AI text-to-image model created by Stability.AI. Today begins the series with images based on a classic video game.
Earlier this year, I used the low-resolution screenshot of Williams’ 1982 Moon Patrol video game from its Wikipedia page and manipulated it with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111’s stable-diffusion-webui tool. After many, many iterations with img2img and some inpainting, I arrived at the image above. The most difficult part of the image was creating the moon buggy with six wheels, something that most SD 1.5 derived models seem to abhor.
Later, I took another stab at transforming the gameplay screenshot to a high resolution version. This time, I used controlnet to create the moon buggy based on the Alvis Stalwart. With inpainting, I was able to achieve great detail and lighting on the buildings.
Wouldn’t it be cool to see a new Moon Patrol game with high resolution graphics and ray tracing? Layer on backstory, mythos, and a brooding protagonist and it could be the next Halo series!
Y and I finished watching the Attack on Titan (2013-2023) anime series tonight. The character of Survey Corp Commander Erwin Smith reminded of this resolute WWI soldier bronze statue by Coeur de Lion MacCarthy at Niagara Falls, Canada.
Considering wars past and present, AoT points out the irrationality and tribalism that propels these kinds of conflicts. It reflects the seeming inevitability of repeating past mistakes mired in violence and death. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) covers much of this ground, too. Even though the subject matter and mythologies in these series are different, they are clearly in dialog with one another regarding the human condition, free will, tribalism/social structures, and propensity for violence over dialog and compromise. Both seem to say that we are doomed to repeat
Y and I drove to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls for our honeymoon in 2009. One of the places that we stopped at among the many kitschy and wonderful tourist traps there was Brick City, a huge world constructed out of LEGO sets and populated by minifigures. There were trains, planes, and automobiles. There were science fictional time-and-space juxtapositions of the American West, Ancient Egypt, and 18th century piracy. There were space shuttles landing while another stood waiting on the launch pad. There is an AC/DC concert stage and the Golden Gate Bridge. Among the beautiful discord of scenes, sets, and characters was a custom model of Niagara Falls complete with a tightrope walker and the Maid of the Mist. For a LEGO maniac like myself who was eager to explore what’s there, it was a worthwhile place to visit. Unfortunately, it seems to have have closed down since then.
