Art Breeder —A Great AI for Designers
Art Breeder is a unique project. It providers the ability to mix, mesh and generate art from “parent” images. This is commonly done with an increasingly popular machine learning model known as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) which use two primary engines, a generator and a discriminator to create images and then verify how similar they are to images being trained with. Art Breeder takes this style of algorithm to another level by allowing the user to mix components from different images into new ones that can actually turn out quite sensible.
This is an especially interesting application for concept designers and anyone who really needs to create or see varieties of options for art (i.e. for a new video game we might want to see what the main character looks like in 10 different styles to see which ones fits best). Being able to upload your own art and generate variations of it or simply being able to generate a bunch of different scenes or characters as a starting point for an actual art piece are both time saves and might even aid in creativity.
The Categories
This app has different models that allow for building different types of images. I mainly spent all my time in the landscape and buildings composing sections because I somehow couldn’t get decent creations out of the people, face and character sections.
Landscapes
For landscapes Art Breeder offers the ability to upload your own art as input. This is really interesting because it allows artists to explore variations on their own work they likely never imagined. The app lets you modify image’s “genes” when you go to compose a new generated image.
Aside from editing genes for an image, you can also create randomized “children” which are basically variants of the original image.
And thirdly you can cross breed images with other ones to create entirely new scenes.
I tried this out with one of my own low skilled concept art pieces and was kinda surprised what i was able to generate from it.
Here is another small landscape sketch i was able to “breed” into a more interesting landscape.
Buildings
Buildings are another interesting type of piece to generate. And the fact you can save creations you like and start modifying their genes from there, means there’s an endless rabbit hole of mixing and matching with Art Breeder.
Summary
Overall Art Breeder is a very cool app that’s a lot of fun to mess around with but could also provide some real value to concept artists to help get over writers block. I will definitely be watching this project as it progresses!
