AI Art is interesting. I have been rendering my own stuff on my machines for a decade now. I can customize exactly what I want, and then get it. It takes a lot of time twisting dials and then hitting render and hoping it works out though. It probably took me between a week and a month to get my Jasmine model to exactly how I liked it. AI Art takes out the hours, days, or more of preparation time, and replaces it with a scattergun approach. I spent a few minutes putting in some text prompts saying what I was looking for, and asked the AI engine to give me some samples. Night Cafe Studio sent me around a hundred, and I sorted them down to one that I liked. Jasmine looks like she is done with someone’s crap. Probably Jack. Jack can be a pain in the butt.
The AI art craze is changing the art world. Even artists who used to do “traditional” 3D rendering have shifted over to using AI art. It just so happens that a computer rig built for high end renders can also run an AI art installation in local. Instead of spending minutes or hours twisting the dials to get just the right look, can now put in some text prompts and generate a few dozen possible shots in a matter of minutes, all via your own computer’s graphics card. My rig can’t do that, but free AI render sites are available. I run hundreds of sample renders while writing, narrow them down to a few dozen that I actually like, and then pick one or three to use as final reference pics. This is Jasmine gone anime via the dezgo dot com everything anime 4.0 engine.
I have a pair of low end rendering rigs at my house. Cheap video cards, with a heavy helping of RAM and large hard drives to give them room to work. I use them to render character shots and scenes. Lighting, camera angles, and posing often takes me hours to get right. I spend a few minutes moving things around, hit render, and go do something else. Come back in an hour to see if I got it right. Repeat until I’m happy with the scene. Then I hit a long run 4 or 8-hour render to bring it out in full detail. The better rig can do it in 3 or 4, the lesser rig in 8 or 10 hours. The key is, I can get a near 1 for 1 ratio of renders I like with this practice. Here are Jack and Jasmine, rendered in DAZ Studio. They are Out of Time and Space.
DAZ Studio launched eighteen years ago, promising that non-artistic types could render images on fairly low-end systems. I tried it back then, but 3D modeling was still in its infancy, and my results were rather meh. I came back some years later when I saw that technology had improved. I was writing and publishing stories by then, and I wanted to use it to create character references. Jasmine was one of the first characters I created, by combining various free or cheap character models, skins, hair, eyes, and clothing. This model dates back to 2014, making her my oldest model still in use. I nailed her look early, and have never felt a need to improve it since. This is Jasmine, created and rendered in DAZ Studio.
I never hired an artist to do a drawing of Jasmine. I had other projects and stuff going on, and my finances started getting tighter thanks to the extra costs involved in Obamacare. I just never got around to it. Though I still kept my eyes out for good artists. Shoni89 created his own models and rendered images with them, usually basing them off some game character. I don’t know which character this model was supposed to represent, but I thought she looked like how I saw Jasmine in my mind. So I asked him to render an image with this outfit. It became the first piece of art I had to represent Jasmine, and I still open up this image when writing scenes with her. The “real” Jasmine is a bit more tanned, but this is a very nice piece that represents her well.







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