Ferghus

Engaged Member
Aug 25, 2017
2,916
4,480
These posts are getting huge, so let's define a few key theses that are going to be relevant throughout:
1. Very clearly someone directing a tool can be an artist. This tool can be advanced and substitute parts of the labor that may have otherwise been required. Example 1: a digital painter using Photoshop to execute their vision. Photoshop has plenty of features to help along, including AI algorithms, such as generative fill and smart masking. Example 2: a photographer using an iPhone. iPhone does plenty of things to improve picture quality, oftentimes WITHOUT any decision making from the photographer. For example, it will detect the presence of the sun and adjust brightness and colors accordingly. If you know anything about DSLR photography, you will know that it's a pretty massive part of taking a picture. There are loads more, these are just simple to understand examples.
2. Very clearly someone directing a person can be an artist. See my previous example of a movie director. In this instance, that person is NOT necessarily an artist themselves. For example, a camera operator can just be told how to execute the shot, without their input.

Also, since English language is complicated and the term "artist" has several meanings, I'm going to specifically refer to a person drawing something as a "painter" and a person who is performing some kind of creative endeavor as an "artist", to avoid confusion.

See thesis 2. Either or both could be considered an artist. It depends on the situation. It could be that commissioner is very strict on their vision and the painter just does the work of putting it on the canvas, then the commissioner is the artist (the one doing creative work). It could be that the painter has complete creative freedom with just a general idea given, in which case the painter would be the artist. It could be that both contribute, making them both artists.

I recommend you read a book on basic fundamentals of drawing. One of the first things you are taught is to never think about drawing "an object" and its relations in 3D space but rather think about simple 2D shapes that you see. Painters quite literally disable their depth perception on purpose by closing one eye when observing their subjects. The famous training exercise of drawing upside down is meant to force you to stop thinking about real world concepts and focus on the shapes. There are some techniques that have to do with thinking of simple 3D shapes (like spheres, cylinders, cubes) on the canvas and constructing the subject from there, but those are in no way a requirement to paint.

We could also talk about how neural networks do actually quite literally get an understanding of real world concepts - an easy to understand example would be that embeddings of language models words such as "king" and "queen" will be in the roughly in the same relation to each other as words "man" and "woman", despite being in different parts of the latent space. Meaning the model will understand the concept of gender. But it's not super important to this particular point. It's just that the model will get whatever information or concepts necessary to perform its task by nature of training, sometimes better than humans (this is how we lost to bots in chess for example, or discover new mathematical proofs via AI).

Hands by the way are famously difficult to draw in perspective, especially in arbitrary poses. Remember I talked about people mistakenly witch hunting actual painters? Well that often comes from hands not looking perfectly acceptable. And not only that, but AI will of course be affected by any errors in the dataset that was used to train it. In that sense, AI was bad at hands because humans are bad at hands! Isn't that cool? Notice I said "was", that's because newer models have been pretty good at hands for quite a while now. Finally, if you see extremely bad hands on a gen, that's because the author didn't put any effort into fixing them up. With inpainting it's extremely easy to do. This will be relevant later.

I mean you can study why a model made a particular "choice", we do all the time. It's just difficult, it's like if the painter was in another language. Speaking of languages, humans also do things rather "mindlessly" oftentimes. For example, native speakers often struggle to explain rules of their language to a learner, saying something like "I dunno man, it's just how to is". That's because they internalized it through practice, rather than consciously thinking about grammar rules. This is what becoming "fluent" essentially is. This applies to many skills where they kind of become automatic rather than being conscious. Painting is no exception. One of the best times I was painting was where I was in the "flow", rather than thinking about it consciously. And to be clear, no one is claiming that AI is conscious. I consider it a tool, but a clever one at that, and one that has many attributes of a person executing your decisions for you. Makes sense, since it does have neural networks at its heart.

I don't know why this is important. The point is basically thesis 1. Not sure why you'd want a tool to do research, or what you mean by that.

Then I'm not sure what your example has to do with the discussion, or what it was supposed to illustrate.

As long as we agree that it has nothing to do with copying or tracing or editing or theft, then I'm good with this. Just don't want to pollute the discourse with inaccurate emotional language.

You cannot possibly how well you detect AI art because, well, you cannot possibly know anything about the ones you don't detect. It's been very possible to generate perfectly good artwork that vast vast majority of people won't be able to detect for a while now. It just takes more effort and knowledge. The ones you see as "obvious" are low effort gens. Just like regular artwork, bad gens are more prevalent. I have personally seen a couple of people pass themselves off as normal artists to take on commissions. Their works are posted in public on websites that banned AI gens. Believe me, I'm no less upset by low effort gens than you are. I'm equally as upset by low effort everything though. I mean again, we are on f95.
No offense my guy, but I don't think this is going to be very productive to keep going. I'm going to go like "no, you're not getting what I'm saying" and you're going to do the same, and it's going to get more complicated as the amount of talking point branches increase.
 

MidnightKing

Active Member
Jun 27, 2017
500
2,871
Alright while that mess is going on, I decided to follow through and created a thread about monster/alien/whatever else games. Peep my profile if you want the direct link.

Note: Super barebones until I set aside more time to fill it out, but it's a start. Features Teraurge of course, and I included a little picture of Caenemung for the knowers and cultured individuals alike
 

LS47

Member
Oct 5, 2021
177
426
Alright while that mess is going on, I decided to follow through and created a thread about monster/alien/whatever else games. Peep my profile if you want the direct link.

Note: Super barebones until I set aside more time to fill it out, but it's a start. Features Teraurge of course, and I included a little picture of Caenemung for the knowers and cultured individuals alike
The hero of the people.
 

hatass

Member
Oct 6, 2017
134
129
No offense my guy, but I don't think this is going to be very productive to keep going. I'm going to go like "no, you're not getting what I'm saying" and you're going to do the same, and it's going to get more complicated as the amount of talking point branches increase.
Actually I thought that it was a really interesting discussion and it made me think of this topic in new ways. Sad to hear that wasn't the case for you or that my post ended up being reduced to "you don't get what I'm saying" in your view. I'd like to think I understood your points well enough.
 

hatass

Member
Oct 6, 2017
134
129
Hey you two, get a room already.

Seriously though, art is something that is defined by the beholder more than anything else. What constitutes "real art" varies from person to person, a concept that many people seem to forget.
Unfortunately this also means that some people take offense to certain art and attack its creators. All the more sad when it's done on mistaken premises. But it is what it is.
 

Meandraco

Newbie
Apr 13, 2018
28
647
Since despair is seemingly setting in: I'm still working on it.

a5b261e4e2408b743888b67473192e4f.png
This is a badly cropped pic of male of caenemung's kind in an underwater environment. It's all messy and smudgy because it's not done.

I don't know what to tell ya people, it really do take a lot of work to make the game. I'm probably incompetent and inefficient on a lot of areas of the development but I'm still working on it. I wish other people made games like mine.

I genuinely planned on making a blogpost about the current state of dev on april again, but I wanted to include a huge pile character head shots to illustrate the breadth of the content and I didn't yet have many sprites entirely done, so I stumbled and fumbled past the date because I needed to do other things and my personal life got busy, etc. Currently I'm working on the new character sprites so I can do a lavish blog post and get some art done.

Here's another one, (PC sketch for size, also note the new background for tavern interactions.)
fc2fa789e09cd237e12d153369c30ff5.png

Here's a third, again, note the smudgy unfinished nature of the sprite.
561f1d80578539042ccb85fd0d2a49d6.png

Have even a fourth one, in this one the PC has crammed himself into a tiny round clay house with a tiny lady, the hole in the ceiling being the door the lady specifically enlarged to get PC inside her dwelling.
cd0294fdb58e053bb10d82a339b9a023.png
Note it entirely lacks detail, because it's not finished.

Let's have a fifth one to give more context.
cb289c63c0084aeb7bcbccff51c67236.jpg

Anyway, the Unity port of the game is code wise done (for multiple months now) and I'm writing and drawing up the loose ends for the content. I've been working on TU this entire time but making predictions or marketing is a thing I don't really jive with. I'm glad people are so passionate about the game to be honest.
 

BaloneyAmone

Active Member
Mar 3, 2021
609
1,155
Rating each creature in the latest developer post based on the boopability of their snoots:

A faceless horror of the deep, who traded his eyes to forever know the glories of R'yleh. He's got a completely flat, ordinary shaped head, and quite a large mouth: extending a digit to boop something might just see it getting lopped off depending on where you reach...
The female Caenemung I recall being kind of a dick at first, but willing to come around. I don't want to stereotype, so I'm not ruling out the possibility of this specimen being more polite, and conducive to physical contact.

2/10, there's just not much a snoot to boop. Chin scritches aren't necessarily out of the question, however, depending on how well-behaved he is.

A gremlin, through and through. Just look at this little fella's gremlin face: I can already picture him trying to peddle me some of his (probably stolen) wares in an over-the-top Bostonian accent, haggling over every single item I try and buy. The protruding (scritchable) chin is really what sells this to me.
The head structure isn't very conducive to booping antics, especially with those exposed vampire teeth, but you can work with that ridge formed from the indent between his eye sockets and above his upper lip; maybe call it an anti-snoot and go from there? He'll probably try and charge you for the attempt, though; something about "'Ey, I got a reputation 'ere!".

3/10. Again, there just isn't really much of a snoot to boop, but I'm adding a point because there's better opportunity for improvisation.

A fun design, for sure. The contrast betwen the pale flesh (right away reminiscent to me to a Braq, a creature that itself is quite boopable) and the brilliant vermilion... fur? fabric? hair? grass? woven souls of the damned? covering the topside of its head and apparently reaching down to give it some fabulous hair.
But I'm getting sidetracked; we're here for snoots, not artistic critique. This is the first of the creatures that actually has a defined snout, which obviously means it can (and should) be booped. The size difference is more up to taste, given that the core idea behind snoot boops is the lack of extertion for the booper (you're really gonna have to stretch your arm to make it work), but I'm for it. I can imagine it letting you boop its snoot, huffing on your face in approval, and then continuing to expound upon Muscular Christianity.

7/10. You've got some snoot, which even comes with a different coating from the rest of its body. The lack of a defined kot/pupper nose is the biggest mark against it.

I want to pick it up. I am going to pick it up. You cannot stop me.
Even as the rough sketch that it is, it's totally adorable. Granted, it doesn't seem to have a snout -- that looks like more a beak sitting between those big teal orbs -- but, like, just look at its pose, that little smile, its wormy 'lil body! It probably even does a little laugh/cackle when you lift it up off the ground; it's just got that vibe to it. By and away the most conducive to booping shenangians.

8/10. I am already squee'ing in delight at the prospect of touching it, even if it's held back by not having a proper snout.
 

RedPillBlues

I Want to Rock your Body (To the Break of Dawn)
Donor
Jun 5, 2017
5,059
12,587
Since despair is seemingly setting in: I'm still working on it.

View attachment 3653182
This is a badly cropped pic of male of caenemung's kind in an underwater environment. It's all messy and smudgy because it's not done.

I don't know what to tell ya people, it really do take a lot of work to make the game. I'm probably incompetent and inefficient on a lot of areas of the development but I'm still working on it. I wish other people made games like mine.

I genuinely planned on making a blogpost about the current state of dev on april again, but I wanted to include a huge pile character head shots to illustrate the breadth of the content and I didn't yet have many sprites entirely done, so I stumbled and fumbled past the date because I needed to do other things and my personal life got busy, etc. Currently I'm working on the new character sprites so I can do a lavish blog post and get some art done.

Here's another one, (PC sketch for size, also note the new background for tavern interactions.)
View attachment 3653190

Here's a third, again, note the smudgy unfinished nature of the sprite.
View attachment 3653219

Have even a fourth one, in this one the PC has crammed himself into a tiny round clay house with a tiny lady, the hole in the ceiling being the door the lady specifically enlarged to get PC inside her dwelling.
View attachment 3653245
Note it entirely lacks detail, because it's not finished.

Let's have a fifth one to give more context.
View attachment 3653251

Anyway, the Unity port of the game is code wise done (for multiple months now) and I'm writing and drawing up the loose ends for the content. I've been working on TU this entire time but making predictions or marketing is a thing I don't really jive with. I'm glad people are so passionate about the game to be honest.
Glad to see some art. Shame that you havent been posting to your site in awhile, as I think along with everyone here love it. But honestly rather you work on art for the game rather then pinups. Any chance any of the new characters will have similar vines to
 
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