Show HN: ML enabled creative tools for artists and designers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ML enabled creative tools for artists and designers

vizcom.co

70 pointskadokaelan28 comments

My partner is a digital artist who makes a living off of freelance/commission work.

I've been on the lookout for tools in this area since I suspect they're going to be a large part of art development in the future -- start with something rough out of a tool like this, and use it to save yourself a bunch of time early on + work on the details.

Will share this!

I often wonder if the internet is useful for artists to earn money. And if so how.

Would you mind explaining how your partner aquires clients?

Are there online marketplaces for this type of work?

She contracts through various Discord servers, to a combination of friends and random people.

It's definitely not Fiverr or whatever typical thing you'd expect, it's hard to earn money that way.

Easier if you do niche stuff and cater to specific online communities + establish a reputation.

You mean like going to a discord server about dragons and announcing "Hey, I draw dragons! Does anybody want me to draw them as a dragon?".

That sounds like a lot of effort that has to go into this type of marketing then?

  > That sounds like a lot of effort that has to go into this type of marketing then?

Ha, yeah that could definitely be the case depending on what kind of art you're doing I suppose.

She prefers to draw "adult art" for certain niche kinks/fetishes, which have a very large "supply & demand" problem. She enjoys drawing this stuff and does it for fun in free time.

(She will draw mostly anything though. She's done logos for small businesses, portraits bought as gifts to friends/family, etc.)

I could ask her more about how she gets clients/commissions if you want, but I think generally it goes something like this:

  1. Join a Discord server based around the particular fetish

  2. Post her work in the channels they have for "#i-made-this" or other original content

  3. Hang out and chat, mention that she does commissions

  4. Wait for people to DM her

And from what she said, it was much harder at the beginning just starting out. What happened was that once she had done a couple dozen commissions, those people would recommend her to other people and the work sort of sporadically but continuously has been rolling in this way.

It's a bit of a snowball effect thing.

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

Damn, those sword examples on the front page look like ass. (https://www.vizcom.co/static/media/weapons.143795cb.png)

I suspect half the use case of this is "this does a quick and dirty shading that gets you 75% of the way there" but man, I would paint over everything about those sword examples.

My co-founders and I have spent the last few months building Vizcom.

Artist and Designers have many ideas, but limited time and skills to realize their ideas. Our vision is to build ML tools that shorten the distance from having an idea and bringing it to life.

Currently, we have 2 products - generator and SKR. SKR automatically renders 2d sketches. Generator generates abstract images meant to spark creativity.

Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Small note: Clicking 'Sign Up' routes to 'Sign In' modal requiring another click to sign up to update the form component. Small detail, but worth commenting on. Flow is broken.

Extremely valuable, thank you! We fixed that flow so now it works as intended.

As and artist and designer I don't need machines to be creative. My brush is a tool under my control, my computer is a tool under my control.

Focus on doing one thing well as a tool. Leave creativity for people.

It seems to me that OP's tool is not meant to replace the human creative process, but to support it. Like an intermediate step in the creative process that allows for more iterations.

> Leave creativity for people

That seems like a very black and white way of thinking. Where do you draw the line between human and 'machine-assisted' creativity? The second you start creating a mood board for your next project, you've probably already taken advantage of algorithmic feeds and content aggregators, but it's still you feeding the machine with querys etc.

It is not black and white without a reason. But it is useless even to try to explain. And I don't create mood boards. I do research, and in this research computer is a tool.

Algorithmic feeds and content aggregators are for kids or the next cheap "decorator" with designers title. There is a only one historically proven way to be good in something and it is called learning and practicing.

In this space, especially for the teaching-oriented, I recommend the new book "Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design" by Levin and Brain.

Awesome, will check it out

This is very cool, I'm curious if you can give some details of the best use case you've seen?

We're developing hardware prototypes with our industrial designers, and I get 3D CAD designs from them. They can take the time to turn the CAD into visual design, but that takes time. Would this be a good tool for them to take the CAD, take a photo, and create demonstrations for how the product would look in the real world?

Curious if that's a realistic direction, and how else you see it being used. Nice work.

Hello one of the co-founders here . I have a background in industrial design and am very aware of the process. So currently this is focused on the actual 2D design & development process that creatives go through when coming up with their ideas. Normally they would spend hours in photoshop trying to visualize their 2D sketches to 3D modelers who then build them but with our software we're trying to completely automate that part.

A natural evolution of this I feel like would be going from 2D sketches and synthetically reconstructing them in 3D which would accelerate the entire design process as a whole . Something we're working on now.

As of now we function in 2D ideation phase of art & design. I hope this answers some of your thoughts and questions . Thanks for the comment.

I'm very interested in converting images to 3d models. Really cool tech that feels like it's nearly there.

Have you by chance seen any of the work Facebook has been doing related to the 2d to 3d conversions?

https://github.com/facebookresearch/pifuhd

In an ideal world (for me) the output would be an .fbx file that could be uploaded directly into blender or unreal engine.

yes I have, so freaking cool ! Im thinking the same exact thing . Obj,Fbx all the standard 3D formats :D

The generator stuff is pretty wild - I got some real Cronenbergs.

I wonder if, in 5 years, we'll start to see this kind of trippy AI aesthetic filter into illustration and animation. Or maybe the AI will just get more naturalistic.

It looks like a decent sketch enhancement tool. I would suggest to focus on that so that you could find your first customers in realistic amounts of time.

Great insight. S2R is definitely the breadwinner. We have lots of cool ideas for generator such as cross breading images together and adding sliders to explore the GAN space. We are also currently exploring other tool ideas. Lots of possibilities!

Does Marc Brunet (and the other artists) know that you're using their art on your website? Because otherwise, that's incredibly uncool of you to do.

It looks cool but isn't working well, I signed up for a free trial and can't get it to export in 4k without errors.

Ah good catch! We just launched 4k exports so theres still a couple bumps. Fixed this. Had to extend the timeout in our gunicorn server

This level of responsive and attention to detail is a good example of why you will likely win in this space. Impressive.

I want something like this but for music

Then this would be it

https://open.starmony.io/play/9f5ce8d6-cfac-4bd4-83b7-985851...

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