Happy Birdthday To April OR as we call her, the hardest working mouse in the Forums. LIttle White Mouse.

[Navalpride33]

Happy Birthday To you...

Happy Birthday To you..

Happy Birthday Miss April (your name is no secret to the vets 😛 ).

Happy Birthday to You!

LWM save us some Beaver tails and some Tim Hortons Coffee. As is tradition (with me anyway), on sending you a Happy Birthday as a reminder of our (or my), gratitude to your presence/grace.

Its not intended to remind you of how old you feel (Ala PM Trudeau Made his feelings known to the Queen while she joked about about it). Yet, I'm aware of the unintended consequences of my kind kamikaze ways. Therefor, I'm prepare to put my ship, under your female crosshairs to enact your incoming barrage of shells (equaling to the number of years of your presence/grace in this world).  

 

There, I would be content for making you smile in doing so.

Again Happy Birthday To You LWM...

 

(now if LWM is no longer in the forums... Pass the word to her whoever has her contact info)

PS

 

Yes This is The notorious Navalpride33 of the old forums.

 

 

 

[I_cant_Swim_]

@LittleWhiteMouse^^^^

[Admiral_Karasu]

Happy birthday, LWM!

And welcome aboard, BTW, ehm.. notorious @Navalpride33!

[_KlRlTO_]

Indeed, Happy Birthday to the Mouse of all Mice! 

[Wolfswetpaws]

Happy birthday to @LittleWhiteMouse.  🙂 

[UnrepentantSinner]

Happy Birthday to the best CC World of Warships ever had!  

[Snargfargle]

[Tpaktop2_1 NA]

Happy Birthday LWM 

[GoGo_Gadget_Secondaries]

happy birthday 🙂

[clammboy]

Happy birthday to the mouse that roared thanks for all your help and enjoy your special day.

Edited February 12 by clammboy

[Frostbow]

Happy Birthday, April!

 

 

[_KlRlTO_]

Is @LittleWhiteMouse doing okay? She hasn't posted in a month and a half, and I can't tell if she has reacted to anything. 

[Wolfswetpaws]

25 minutes ago, _KlRlTO_ said:

Is @LittleWhiteMouse doing okay? She hasn't posted in a month and a half, and I can't tell if she has reacted to anything. 

I have no news or information.
Tagging @Chobittsu

[Chobittsu]

She's been busy with a lotta other things, projects ranging big and small, such as learning how to use Blender.   The software, not the household appliance

[Gaelic_knight]

Happy birthday mouse 

[Snargfargle]

6 hours ago, Chobittsu said:

She's been busy with a lotta other things, projects ranging big and small, such as learning how to use Blender.   The software, not the household appliance

I've been wondering what you, as a graphics artist, think of AI-generated art. Will it put graphics artists out of business or will they utilize it as part of their own work?

 

[Chobittsu]

4 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

I've been wondering what you, as a graphics artist, think of AI-generated art. Will it put graphics artists out of business or will they utilize it as part of their own work?

The genie is already out of the bottle on it...  it's not art, by definition, which is "The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination".  AI-generated images are not art, they are just images, and skilled artists like myself will always find our abilities in demand as AI-generated images are actually very easy to spot when you know what you're looking for. This usually comes in the form of strange design elements in technical parts of the image, such as the blender's cord/handle above or the warships in the background higher up in the thread, the motion of the waves in the same image, or the fact that the mice have inconsistent numbers of fingers and toes (real mice have 4 front, 5 back).  Other hints can take the form of illegible text or, as I've noticed lately, a specific method of highlighting in the hair of anime style images.   Another good rule of thumb is "If it looks like a Sakimichan painting, it's probably AI".
While you can input whatever you want into the AI, it's only as accurate as the model training you install, or the prompts you give it. And even then, it won't be exact.  Say you want the ships in the background to be, specifically, the Bismarck and Hood. You would need to train an AI on those ships. But as it tries to fill in the blanks, it'll make errors, but it'll try and smooth those out to look like they're part of the ship, and so on and so on.

As for taking our jobs, I myself in my post-WoWS years of have fallen into the company of a group of engineers and designers who have me working on taking all the sketches, CG renders and misc stuff and matching the style together so everything looks the same for their presentations to...... some very high level folks.    You could tell your AI to generate you an image an orbital solar power plant, but if nobody has made a thousand existing images for that AI to work from, no matter how good it is, it can't make something that doesn't exist yet.
I'd love to see em try and do a nuclear-power orbital gunship, for example.

(labels and other detail layers removed due to sensitive information)

Or another good example is concept art, like what my fren Bec does;

AI can't do this...
However, if used properly, there are certain applications it can be helpful, though they're pretty niche, such as if you're running a D&D campaign and need to make characters or locations on the fly. While not required, it can be handy for something like that, but only if you're working really fast, and with a well-trained AI.

Now, for using it as part of my own work, I'd really rather not. I HAVE done a single test, doing a project from start to finish with an AI as a secondary tool, but only to supplement my own skills; I set aside one of my own fan art projects, my ship, captain, and XO from Star Trek Online, as a test so as not to pollute anything I was doing for other people.
Using the image-to-image feature, I would do the whole image as I normally would, run it through the AI, and it would spit out an edited version, I would then use that as reference to make the changes myself, by my own hand.   And in the end, it really wasn't all that much; shifting the knee of the Orion a bit lower, some folds of the fabric, and one or two shadows here and there.   In the end, it was pretty negligible and nobody would have noticed.    (click for full image)

It won't put artists out of business, nor is it likely to become a tool used by existing artists, but it sure as hell is annoying when I see some damn ad thats like "create amazing anime art in minutes!" when I've spent the past 20 years learning how to do it by hand.

[Snargfargle]

4 hours ago, Chobittsu said:

The genie is already out of the bottle on it...  it's not art, by definition ...It won't put artists out of business, nor is it likely to become a tool used by existing artists, but it sure as hell is annoying...

Thank you for your detailed reply.

A guy I went to grad school with has made a pretty good living for himself as an artist and author. Joe combined his inherited artistic talent (his aunt, Donna Aldridge, was a well-known local artist) and his biological knowledge to produce wildlife art that's some of the best in America. His drawings, based on actual specimens that he catches, are so detailed that an ichthyologist who viewed one once realized that it was of an hitherto undescribed subspecies.

I can remember when he was selling his original drawings for $50 because, like the rest of us, he was a poor grad student and needed the money. I couldn't afford one but I did get him to sign a bunch of the early prints that he was selling at the research museum where I worked as an assistant curator. He also signed a copy of his book for me. He and another guy, who was also a biology grad student, traveled through quite a bit of America catching and drawing fish for Fishes of the Central US.

https://www.americanfishes.com/en/

This is an example of his aunt's art. Unfortunately, she is now deceased.

https://evareynoldsfinearts.com/artworks/october-creek/

Edited February 16 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

4 hours ago, Chobittsu said:

the mice have inconsistent numbers of fingers and toes

LOL, as a mammalogist, I picked up on that right away but the rest of my "art" was so darned cute that I posted it anyway. I chocked it up to a genetic mutation. I'm thinking that maybe that mouse's great grandpa and grandma emigrated to the US from Chernobyl.

Quote

there are certain applications it can be helpful, though they're pretty niche, such as if you're running a D&D campaign and need to make characters or locations on the fly.

My new avatar is an AI generated image of my username. I rather like it. The larger picture has the "snargfargle" growing out of the roots of a tree. As I created it in my mind as some sort of ancient forest god, that's quite appropriate.

 

Edited February 16 by Snargfargle

[Admiral_Karasu]

AI made this.

[hairoids]

Happy birthday LWM, thank you for all of your fantastic reviews.