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.
Share your thoughts on this article in the comments below.
Andrew, is there any reason that you bring me to your webpage with an advertisment on creating character portraits, without any sign of a working link, or even a name for the software?!? I’m suitably unimpressed with this deceit!
Hi Richard, I see that the portrait generator that this article is covering is redeveloping it’s website. That’s frustrating but is the way of the web.
I’m curious about your comment though. I am not, and have never, run an advert for this coverage.
Have you seen an ad that makes it appear as if this blog is claiming to provide AI software solutions? That’s also frustrating if you have as it is not official and does indeed misrepresented the piece.
Hey, I’ve only just found your site, looks so good! I really hope you come back up soon, the portraits look perfect for D&D, just exactly what I’d love to use.
Cheers and hope you’re doing well!
For people looking for this generator: it has moved to https://www.fantasy-faces.com/ and with an option to run it yourself to generate faces (using your local GPU).
Chrome throws an error about an invalid certificate on this site.
Can’t access with Firefox, either. :-/
This website doesn’t appear to be working which is very unfortunate, I hope it will be back online soon. Are there any alternatives to this portrait generator or is it the only one of its kind?
Yes, I think Artbreeder is your best bet followed by Generate.photos as a backup option. I’ve popped links to them in the original article as an update.