Virtua Fighter! Now there’s a classic arcade fighting game that brings back some good memories! I used to play that game all the time when I was growing up in the 90s and I thought it was so cool!
The game featured several different polygonal characters that you could choose to fight with. Now, those characters have been given a realistic makeover thanks to AI. These designs come from Colin Williamson, who fed the original character images from the game into an image-to-image mode of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image deep learning model.
Williams explained the process, saying: “Just describe the character, and img2img does its best. Though the hardest part was simply figuring out how to describe the characters’ clothes. Once I found a good prompt, I’d do a batch of around 50 and cherry-pick the funniest ones. I tried this thing called ‘negative prompting,’ where you tell the AI stuff like ‘please don’t draw messed-up-looking hands,’ which does an excellent job in that now your characters have only six fingers instead of seven.”
The result was this series of more realistic versions of the characters, which you can check out below.
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Source: Arstechnica