A personal project from Andreas Berghammer and friends has created an AI which can draw fantasy portraits. Looking for a face for your D&D or Pathfinder character? This could be the place.
Update: 23 April 2021 – Berghammer’s generator is back online at this new domain.
Update: 25 September 2021 – The new domain is struggling with a valid SSL/security. Nothing I can do to help except pass the news on as I’m not involved in the project.
The portrait generator is free to use, and there’s a gallery of thousands of fantasy faces to browse and download from.
Berghammer asserts that computer-generated images cannot be copyrighted by the programmers and so are being given CC0 licences. That means you can use them in commercial Twitch streams or even books you sell on DrivethruRPG or the DMs Guild.
The technology behind the scenes uses NVIDIA Stylegan2 and an anime faces model of Gwern.
It is also possible to generate avatars using Andreas’ system by yourself through Google Drive and a colab notebook. You can find instructions on how to do so here.
The AI, as you’d expect, isn’t perfect. The training data appears to have been mainly white faces, and so the output is also primarily white. Fresh data will help the system address this. Also, the AI seems to struggle with ears. Is it an elf ear or a leaf in the character’s hair? If you look hard enough, you’ll find portraits with three ears as a result.
However, for a proof of concept and an academic project, Andreas Berghammer’ fantasy character portrait generator is incredibly impressive.
Update: 30 September 2021 – The fantasy portrait generator continues to struggle to stay up (perhaps due to demand). Two alternatives, although not exclusively fantasy, are;
– Artbreeder – give it images, it merges them to create new fantasy/any portraits.
– Generated.Photos – a portrait generator/model generator but not fantasy.
What do you think? Sound off in the comment section below.
