Tag: Art

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AI Powered Art Tools

Today we are going to look at two vastly different AI powered art generation tools, Luminar and NVIDIA GauGAN Beta. Luminar is a powerful art processing tool, a cross between Photoshop and Lightroom, but AI assisted. We recently covered Luminar hands-on including how to use it with Affinity Photo here and it is currently (2021-01-05) in the final 24 hours of a Humble Bundle sale.

NVIDIA GauGAN on the other-hand is a web based application that is part of the NVIDIA AI Playground. GauGAN is described as:

GauGAN, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, creates photorealistic images from segmentation maps, which are labeled sketches that depict the layout of a scene.

Artists can use paintbrush and paint bucket tools to design their own landscapes with labels like river, rock and cloud. A style transfer algorithm allows creators to apply filters — changing a daytime scene to sunset, or a photorealistic image to a painting. Users can even upload their own filters to layer onto their masterpieces, or upload custom segmentation maps and landscape images as a foundation for their artwork

You can learn more about GauGAN here, while technical details of the algorithm in the open source implementation hosted on GitHub. You can try an already trained version of the algorithm in action here in your browser.

These are not unique examples in terms of machine learning or AI enhanced art creation tools. In early 2020 Unity acquired Artomatix, the creator of ArtEngine, an AI driven material creation tool. Another project that was recently featured on this site is Cascadeur, a physics based animation tool that uses machine learning to help with animations. DeepMotion Animate 3D is another recently featured machine learning based application, that takes simple 2D footage and makes a 3D rig and animation from the results.

The key thing in all of these tools thus far is they don’t seek to replace the artist, but augment them using deep or machine learning algorithms. You can check out NVIDIA GauGAN and Luminar in action in the video below. For a VERY limited time you can get Luminar on Humble Bundle here. [Expires 01/06! — GFS can receive a commission on Humble purchases]. So what do you say, are AI powered art tools the future?

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Luminar 4 with Affinity Photo

This tutorial is going to be a little outside the normal topic of game development but should still be of interest to some of you because Luminar 4 is currently available on Humble Bundle. Luminar 4 is an AI powered image manipulation program that’s easy enough even I can use it! One of the challenges though is that it doesn’t formally support Affinity Photo out of the box, and Affinity Photo is my photo manipulation weapon of choice. Therefore in this tutorial we will show how to get Luminar 4 up and running on Affinity Photo 1.8.

If you are simply interested in learning more about Luminar 4 be sure to check out our hands-on video, it’s an impressive program.

Installing Luminar 4 with Affinity Photo

First, install Luminar 4. Just go with the defaults and don’t worry about the plugins portion if you don’t already have Photoshop installed.

After Luminar is installed, navigate to the install folder in Explorer. In my case it’s C:\Program Files\Skylum\Luminar 4. Once there, locate and copy the file Luminar4.8bf. Now we need to copy it into the Adobe plugins folder, a folder that you will most likely have to create. In explorer go to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files and if one does not exist, create a folder called Adobe. Inside Adobe create a folder called Plug-ins, then inside that create a folder called CC, then paste the Luminar4.8bf file into that directory. The end result should be something like this:

Luminar 4 plugin folder creation for Adobe Photoshop in use with Affinity Photo

Now right click Luminar 4 in the start menu and Run as Administrator. Now select File->Install Plugins from the main menu.

Install Plugins Menu in Luminar 4

So long as you copied the file earlier into the right folder, you should now see Uninstall in the resulting Window.

Uninstall Luminar Plugin

Click Uninstall then Install and you are done with Luminar. Now fire up Affinity Photo and select Edit->Preferences. In the resulting window select Photoshop Plugins.

Selecting Photoshop Plugins in Affinity Photo

Now click the add button, then select the Luminar directory.

Adding the plugin in Photo

Once selected, Luminar 4 should show up in the detected plugins section. After installing the plugin it will prompt you to restart Affinity Photo. Once done, you can access Luminar 4 in Plugins->Skylum Software->Luminar 4

Running Luminar 4 in Affinity Photo

While these instructions are specific to Affinity Photo, any program such as Paintshop Pro should also be able to install Luminar using this process.

You can learn more about Luminar 4 and the Humble Bundle (plus see the above process in action) in the video below. The Humble links contain an affiliate code that enables you to direct a portion of the proceeds from your purchase to support GFS and thanks so much if you do!

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GIMP 2.99.2 Released

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, just released version 2.99.2 beta, a giant step toward the upcoming 3.0 release. The heart of this update is the move to the GTK 3 UI toolkit from the existing GTK2 version. This has many advantages, especially when it comes to increasingly common HiDPI devices.

Highlights of the 2.99.2 release include:

  • GTK3 based user interface, with native support for Wayland and HiDPI displays.
  • Major refactoring and cleanup
  • New plug-in API
  • Plugins now possible with Python 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala
  • More (color) space invasion
  • Render caching available for better performance

Be sure to check the complete release notes for further details on this release. You can also learn more about the 2.99.2 release and see GIMP in action in the video below.

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Nomad Sculpt

If you’ve ever dreamed of doing 3D modelling on the go, today’s product Nomad Sculpt may be perfect for you. Nomad Sculpt is a 3D sculpting application designed from the ground up to be mobile first. It brings all the functionality you would expect from a modern 3D sculpting application like ZBrush, Mudbox or Blender but it runs on your Android or iOS mobile device!

Key features of Nomad Sculpt include:

  • Clay, Crease, Trim, Smooth, Mask and many other brushes
  • Stroke customization with falloff, alpha and other options
  • Matcap rendering or Physically Based Rendering
  • Vertex painting, with roughness/metalness control
  • Multiresolution sculpting
  • Voxel Uniform Remeshing, along with subtractive boolean
  • Dynamic Topology, to refine locally your mesh
  • Robust layers that supports topology change
  • Designed from the ground up for a mobile experience
  • Support pencil pressure (Apple Pencil, Samsung S Pen, etc)
  • OBJ, STL and glTF support

Nomad Sculpt is available on the App Store and the Android Store. It is $15 for the complete version, but there is a reasonably full functioning, export disabled trial version available. You can also see Nomad Sculpt in action in the hands-on review below.

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ParticleShop Hands-On

ParticleShop is one of the applications that is featured in the current Be A Creative SuperHero Bundle currently running on Humble. This bundle is a collection of graphical applications and add-ons from Corel. Today we are taking a hands-on look at ParticleShop, a PhotoShop plugin (also compatible with PaintShop Pro 2020 and Affinity Photo) that brings the particle system based brushes from Corel Painter to these other applications.

ParticleShop is described as:

Create stunning image enhancements with ParticleShop, a powerful Adobe® Photoshop® brush plugin powered by Painter. Experience NEW expressive Dynamic Speckle brushes and living grab-and-go Particle brushes and that are easy to use with a pressure sensitive tablet, touchscreen or mouse. Use your creativity and imagination to artistically enhance photos, designs and illustrations with strokes of genius.

We’ve done all of the work for you! Immediately start creating with one of 11 built-in custom brushes. Whether you’re looking to add playful Dynamic Speckle flourishes or compelling Particle flare to your work, you’ll find just the brush you need to artistically enhance your imagery and exponentially increase your range of painting expertise. Plus, explore the additional brush packs that were designed to match your specific workflow needs.

Out of the box ParticleShop ships with a pack with 11 brushes, although the Bundle contains more than a half a dozen additional brush packs. You can see ParticleShop in action, including instructions on how to install in PaintShop Pro and Affinity Photo, as well as showcasing several of the brush packs, in the video below.

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MagicaVoxel 0.99.6.2 Released

The popular free Voxel application MagicaVoxel just got a new release, 0.99.6.2. This release isn’t just significant for adding a large number of features added, but also because it may be the last release we see for quite some time.

A tweet sequence from @ephtracy, MagicaVoxel’s creator:

Now back to the release, details from the release notes:

New Unified Material System[06/30/2020]

  • Blend Material: weighted blending Metal/Plastic/Glass/Cloud materials (similar to Disney Principled BRDF).
  • SSS Material: sub-surface scattering. transparency tp control light transmission. density to control light scattering.
  • Aborb/Scatter/Emissive Media Material: emissive cloud. can be contained in the glass with ior > 1.
  • Improved Alpha Blending: glass material, absorb media type, density = 0, ior = 0, transparency > 0

New Transform and Voxel Shader Brushes[09/26/2020]

  • Refactored the brush menu and add icons.
  • Voxel Shader Brush to use Voxel Shaders interactively and directly.
  • Transform->Scale Brush : live scale models, point sampled, low quality but fast.
  • Transform->Wrap Brush : live wrap/crop models with mirroring and spacing modes.
  • Geometry Mode->Line/Square/Circle: the old center mode is combined with the old line mode
  • World Editor->Pattern and Wrap Brush: can create patterns from selected object (check the pattern model menu on the right panel).

Rotate Transform Brush [09/26/2020]

  • Axis rotate : press any inner circle.
  • Screen rotate : press the outer circle.
  • Sphere rotate : press any point inside the outer circle.
  • Snap rotate : press SHIFT or SHIFT+ALT to snap angle to multiple of 5 or 15.

Voxel Shader[09/13/2020]

  • no need to define id for arguments.
  • use var to define alias of arguments. same as float var = i_args[id];.
  • can import and export arguments values.
  • can display compile errors in the console window.
  • can get color selections via: color_sel().
  • can get palette color via: palette().
  • increase number of arguments to 16.
  • add interation number to the interface.

Editing[09/26/2020]

  • Boolean operations for groups and objects.
  • Modify->Mask/Texture: mask and texture models with pattern models.
  • Sort: only sorts selected colors if number of selection is greater than one.
  • command log: display count of models, scene size, count of voxels for each color, etc.
  • command shear [axis] [scale] [scale] shear model, e.g. shear z 0.2 0.2 .

Camera Control Panel[09/26/2020]

  • click the arrow on the bottom bar to show the camera control panel.
  • can change camera global/local position, pitch/yaw/roll angles, save/load camera slots, etc.
  • press SHIFT to change values in smaller steps.
  • the nine values can also be modified by cmds cam x/y/z tx/ty/tz rx/ry/rz

Pattern Pack[09/26/2020]

  • can load all the models in a project as a pattern pack.
  • can create pattern pack from multiple selected objects.
  • use left/right mouse button to rotate the preview model; use mouse wheel to zoom in/out.
  • use 1/2 to select previous/next color in the palette.
  • use 3/4
  • use ctrl+alt to switch to pattern tool.
  • use ctrl to switch to free move tool.
  • use ESC to switch between pattern/move brush and select brush in the world editor.

You can learn more about the release in the video below. Hopefully this doesn’t mark the final release and after a long well earned pause, MagicaVoxel development will resume!

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Cascadeur Now In Open Beta

Cascadeur is a unique physics based animation system for Linux and Windows (Mac coming soon) that just released into Open Beta.  Details of the first Cascadeur beta release:

New core architecture
The progress from the CBT to the OBT version may appear subtle on the outside, but on the inside the entire core architecture has been revised. As a result, the hardware efficiency and general performance of Cascadeur have improved considerably. With the new data-driven core design, we are able to optimize the software much easier and eliminate bugs faster in the future.

Improved rig creation
One goal of the core redesign was to simplify the rigging process in Cascadeur, by making the rigs adaptable at runtime. We are not there yet, but with the optimized core architecture, we have laid the necessary foundation for moving in this direction. Our long-term endeavor remains to give you instant visual feedback during the entire rigging process. Nevertheless, the new OBT version already offers you improved rig creation tools and other benefits, such as a more user-friendly controller behavior and improved interpolation.

GUI conversion to QML
During the past months, we migrated our GUI from the old QWidgets to the new QML standard. This goal has been achieved, and due to this important transition, we could remove several GUI bugs that came with using QWidgets.

Reverse compatibility issues
Unfortunately, switching to new core caused issues with reverse compatibility. Due to the optimized architecture, your scenes created in the previous versions of Cascadeur will not work in the OBT version. The problem is that old .casc scenes will load only as joints with baked animation and meshes. However, there are simple ways to transfer them to the OBT version. Please refer to this CONVERSION INSTRUCTION for more information.

Changed license model
And last, but not least, we have simplified our licensing model: Any animation created with Cascadeur’s new OBT version can be freely used in commercial games and movies – without asking for Nekki’s permission or paying any license fees.

The future goals of the Cascadeur development team are available on this Trello board roadmap.  More details are available in the documentation as well as in their YouTube based tutorial series.  You can learn more about Cascadeur and see it in action in the video below.

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Pixelmash 2020 Hands-On

Included in the currently running Humble Game Creator Bundle, today we go hands-on with Pixelmash, a pixel art graphics application for Windows and Mac OS.  Pixelmash is described as:

A New, Easier Way To Make Pixel Art and Animated Sprites

Pixelmash is a new kind of pixel art and animation tool that makes quick work of many of the hardest parts of pixel art. Paint or import high-resolution artwork and then non-destructively pixelize it, animate layers using transforms, and apply advanced layer effects to create stunning art in no time. Mix and match hi-res layers with traditional hand-drawn pixel-by-pixel layers for incredible flexibility!

Pixelmash was recently updated to 2020 version, with new features including:

  • Added save and load custom layer effects
  • Added save project as template (saves all layer effects)
  • Added color profile support and management
  • Added gradient effect
  • Added reference image/layer support
  • Added ability to make parent layer effects not affect children
  • Added ability to paint anywhere in tiled view
  • Bug fixes

In the video below we showcase the features and functionality of this interesting pixel art application.

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Blender Tools For Unreal Engine Released

Epic Games have just released a new set of tools aimed at making the lives of Blender users easier when working with Unreal Engine.  The tools consist of two projects, Send to Unreal and UE to Rigify.  Both are available on the Epic Games Github page, although you need to link your GitHub to your Epic account before it will work, instructions are available here.

Send to Unreal is a set of tools enabling you to easy export from Blender completely rigged, textured and animated meshes with a single menu selection.  Send To Unreal documentation is available here.

UE to Rigify goes in the other direction and enables you to import Unreal Engine rigs into Blender and make them compatible with Rigify (which needs to be enabled separately).  UE to Rigidy documentation is available here.

You can see the new Blender Tools in action, including a step by step tutorial on using Send To Unreal, in the video below.  It should be noted that you need to configure Blender to use Unreal Engine 0.01 scale, which I personally found extremely buggy in the current release.  Details on scene scale are available here, however at time of writing following these instructions caused Blender to crash every time I copied an armature into the Rig folder.  There is a good chance I did this part incorrectly in the tutorial, but it’s the only way I found to successfully export while not crashing Blender!

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Game Creator Humble Bundle

The Game Creator Humble Bundle is currently running over at Humble.  The bundle contains dozens of game assets including sprites, 2.5D art, battler images and music assets for use in your game, as well as the 001 Game Creator game engine and PixelMash, a pixel graphics application previously covered here.

As with all Bundles this one is organized into tiers, buy a higher value tier and you get all of the content from the tiers below it.

1$ Tier

  • Tales Of The Far East
  • 2.5D Character Pieces Vol. 3
  • Sci-Fi Backgrounds
  • Seraph Circle Monster Pack 1
  • PVGames Sci-Fi Game Assets
  • 2.5D Character Pieces Vol. 2
  • RPG Battlers 2nd 50 Monsters
  • Horror City Sprite Pack 1
  • CyberPop Interior Tiles

15$ Tier

  • Japanese School Interior Game Assets
  • Battling Center Game Assets
  • Inspirational Music Pack Vol 1
  • Seraph Circle Monster Pack 2
  • RPG Battlers 3rd 50 Monsters
  • RPG Battlers 5th 50 Monsters Shades of Battle
  • Horror City Sprite Pack 2
  • Forest Graveyard Game Assets
  • Retro Music Pack
  • 2.5D Character Pieces Vol. 1
  • RPG Battlers 1st 50 Monsters
  • Pixel Animations and Effects

25$ Tier

  • Train Station Game Assets
  • RPG Battlers 4th 50 Monsters
  • RPG Battlers 6th 50 Monsters
  • Horror City Sewer & Factory Tiles
  • Inspirational Music Pack Vol 2
  • Badass Bosses Monster Pack
  • Survival Horror Music Mega-Pack Vol 2
  • 2.5D Medieval Buildings Vol. 2
  • Medieval Music Pack
  • 2.5D Medieval Buildings Vol 1
  • Sci-Fi Foes Monster Pack
  • Japanese Urban Accessories Pack
  • Creature Feature SFX
  • Classical Adventure
  • Kanagawa Game Assets

30$ Tier

  • Omega Modern Graphics Pack
  • Japanese Arcade Game Assets + Music
  • Nightmare Music Pack
  • Dragon’s Den Resource Pack
  • 001 Game Creator
  • Inspirational Music Pack Vol 3
  • Inspirational Music Pack Vol 4
  • Fantasy Beasts Monster Pack
  • Madness Music Pack
  • Mythos: Reawakening
  • Grand Adventure Music Mega Pack
  • 2.5D Monsters: Daemonum Infernum
  • Horror City Tile Pack
  • Seraph Circle Monster Pack 3
  • 2.5D Nature Pack Vol 1
  • Pixelmash
  • PV Games Humble Bundle Exclusive Pack
  • 16Bit Fantasy Action Music Pack

In terms of license details, be sure to note the following:

ATTENTION: These assets are cleared for noncommercial and commercial use in your games and projects, but cannot be resold as standalone game assets.

As with all Humble Bundles, you get to decide how your money is allocated, including the option to support GFS using this link (Thanks so much if you do!).  You can learn more about the pack in the video below.  Stay tuned for a video on 001 Game Creator coming soon.

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