When AIs create images, it often gets weird, weird, or spooky. What a fan has now managed to do with low-resolution character sprites of the 25-year-old Fallout 1 borders on digital magic.
He used the Stable Diffusion image and text generation model to regenerate the old characters using image presets and text input. The characters are crisp, highly detailed and reflect the tonality of the crumbly originals with amazing credibility.
We got from Reddit user Misha_Air
permission to use one of the images he created for the cover of this article. A user shared more pictures on Twitter:
link to Twitter content
How did that happen?
Using the right side of our cover photo as an example: Misha_Air entered the original sprite into the AI as a default and added various terms to help the model fill in the missing details. The terms were:
woman in metal armor mad max fallout, modern style, detailed face, beautiful face, by greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha, d & d character, in front of an urban background, digital painting, concept art, smooth, sharp focus illustration, artstation hq
With this, the AI was apparently able to create an image that could have come from a professional character designer. And the viewer may also want a remake of Fallout 1, which the rights holder Bethesda has not yet announced.
As the tweet above shows, the maker repeated the process with other sprites from Fallout 1. And the AI delivered, each time with a highly detailed character that nicely reflects the style of the original.
However, neither AI nor Fallout is needed these days for a proper Fallout mood, as the game Miasma Chronicles wants to prove:
2:24
Gloomy fallout atmosphere and tactics: end-time adventure Miasma Chronicles shows gameplay
Powerful AIs
From the images, one can guess that AI image generation has now progressed so far that it could soon face serious competition for professional graphic designers.
Different AI programs, for example, generate complex images from pure text. Or they’re trying to get video game heroes in real people
to transform, which sometimes leads to the most curious results:
Can’t be seen
AI gives game heroes “real” faces
Such dangers also hang over everything in the writing industry, for example the language AI behind DeepL has been generating almost perfect translations within a few seconds for years.
What do you think of Fallout 1’s AI-generated characters? Would you like a remake? Write to us in the comments!
