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A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents

81 points by westsmith 4 days ago | 21 comments

__bias 2 hours 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

Aerroon 9 minutes ago

But if the user thinks it looks fine, then won't most players think the same?

I just don't get the complaints about "use proper art" when it comes to games. Most of the time the game has some other, far more glaring, visual issues (anti-aliasing, clipping, icons-not-matching-items).

sheepscreek 26 minutes ago

Are you saying people unfamiliar with the 'pixel arts' can't enjoy it their own way?

I don't think the author is posing as a professional. These models are like having a 3D printer at home. Very handy in a pinch, but what they make doesn't replace the real thing.

stymaar 16 minutes ago

> Are you saying people unfamiliar with the 'pixel arts' can't enjoy it their own way?

The problem isn't that they look shitty to pixel artists or experts, they look shitty for anyone with a bit of observation.

It's junk art the same way Mc Donald's is junk food.

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

nonethewiser 2 hours ago

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

badsectoracula 49 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.

nonethewiser 6 minutes ago

Yeah compiling to Sierra PIC is a unique advantage over asking the model for an image. But the claim im attacking is different. The claim in attacking is that you cant just tell it to produce images like this directly.

>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.

All of these can be avoided with simple prompts and don’t require all this ceremony.

https://claude.ai/share/78cd63c8-ffdd-4569-8de2-ac8ab5c5cfe0

armcat 3 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

thijson 4 days ago

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

satvikpendem 2 hours ago

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

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 17 minutes ago

You mentioned in your README that it was tested with GLM-5.3 but this is not a multi-modal model. Did you mean GLM-5.3-Flash?

turbobutton 3 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?

Karuma 2 hours 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.

satvikpendem 2 hours ago

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

turbobutton 2 hours 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.

satvikpendem 19 minutes ago

What are you trying to generate? I've also noticed that local models aren't as good as cloud models due to hardware but there are still ways of optimizing the process.

Lerc 2 hours 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.

tonmoy 3 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

vinaygundeti18 2 hours ago

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snapstudio_team 3 days ago

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westsmith 4 days ago

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