A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents (danielball.com)

70 pointsby westsmith4 days ago15 comments

__bias an hour ago

These models always create pixel art that looks like garbage because the people using it don't know enough about the medium to properly judge the output. This article is no exception. If you want pixel art for your project then learn or hire someone with that expertise

vunderba 4 days ago

Nice article. There's another option for pixel art that's recently been coming into vogue as tool usage improves in LLMs which is procedural graphics.

I actually experimented with creating a set of skills around rendering early AGI style EGA graphical scenes, and it worked surprisingly well.

So rather than storing full bitmaps, you instead store sequences of simple drawing instructions designed to recreate some specific scene - like you would an SVG.

As a result you end up sidestepping a lot of the problems with larger generative models, which can have issues with grid alignment, palette choices, and high-frequency noise.

https://github.com/scpedicini/agi-stylist

https://kq-styles.specr.net

thijson 3 days ago

Looks great. This could be a form of image compression.

westsmith 3 days ago

Neat! I've followed you on Github. I like the idea of going to the past to see what works and adapting it for the LLM age. Nice work!

vunderba 3 days ago

Thanks! Yeah, I started building it because I read an interview with the original creators of King’s Quest, Ken and Roberta Williams where they mentioned in passing that it was too expensive (in the 80s) from a storage perspective to store entire bitmaps for each scene, so instead they'd just store a series of very simple drawing instructions and render on demand.

I’m super excited to see more LLM-driven procedural graphics stuff in the future!

armcat 2 hours ago

This is very cool! I will try your method for background and tile creation in the asset-generation tool I've built [1]. Would your procedural method work for animations as well, like sprites?

[1] https://github.com/acatovic/ai-game-studio

satvikpendem an hour ago

Exactly, turn something nondeterministic into something more deterministic and AI does a great job at that.

nonethewiser 31 minutes ago

I suspect your picscript language is an entirely unnecessary abstraction and the prompt (ie the model) is doing all the work.

badsectoracula 18 minutes ago

How so? Judging from the examples the model does seem to take advantage of the language (creates and uses reusable elements) and AFAICT the language itself compiles down to "real" Sierra PIC commands so in theory it can be used with a Sierra PIC viewer/engine.

Lerc an hour ago

Are control nets not being used much anymore? I haven't seen anything that provides a similar level of composition control, and yet I do not see them being referenced much at all.

turbobutton 2 hours ago

Related question: Whenever I try to run Image generation locally, be it with Flux or Qwen, I seem to be getting results that are about 1-2 years behind what ChatGPT can produce today - and take up to 5 minutes for a single image. Is this a hardware problem (running it on a decent windows gaming PC), a configuration problem or just the reality of what local models can deliver at the moment on consumer hardware?

satvikpendem an hour ago

Look into r/StableDiffusion and follow their prompts and download their ComfyUI workflows.

turbobutton an hour ago

Thanks, I've done that, but with mixed results. I've also tried comfyui wrappers and alternatives that try to hide the complexity and just set sensible defaults, but I'm beginning to suspect its ultimately a consumer hardware vs million dollar NVidia server question.

Karuma 42 minutes ago

You can get results a billion times better than the horrible, disgusting look of ChatGPT in less than a couple of seconds with a model like Krea or MOSS, and ComfyUI. With just a 8GB VRAM GPU or so...

Just visit Civitai, look at the pages for the base models, filter for images with the ComfyUI workflow in them, then you can just download and drag and drop them onto your local ComfyUI app.

tonmoy 2 hours ago

I have been asking opus 5.5 to write python to create logos. It is more consistent and easier to control than gen AI for this purpose