Making a Splinterlands Comic Book with AI

in Splinterlands3 days ago

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I'm excited to share my first sharable draft of "The Rift - Part One", a Comic Book I'm putting together about Oshuur and her band of exiles as they take on a Chaos Legion Stronghold! There's still lots of work to do before this is completely done, but you can see the first 13 scenes below. I'd love to get feedback from you guys on the style, the story, any bugs you can spot...basically everything. There are scene numbers on the top right of each frame so you can refer to those to give specific feedback. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on comic books, but I wanted to take on this project as a challenge and to see how far I could take the AI image-generation tools. I've shared a bit more information on my process below the last scene at the bottom.

The story and characters, of course, are based on the @splinterlands lore and characters such as Oshuur, Atuat, Grum, and others. All of these belong strictly to the Splinterlands Company and I am making this purely as a fan of the game and its lore. The first few frames of this story closely follow Oshuur's official lore, but it then adapts into an original story.

Enjoy!


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Process

The process involved in making this were as follows:

(1) Images were created, as usual, using Midjourney. I first generated some of the main characters for the story (Oshuur, Atuat, Fellblade, Grum) and got a few reference images to use for each one to get visual consistency, and then created the scenes required for the story. The visual style I applied was inspired by Todd McFarlane, a well-known comic book artist known for Spiderman and several other iconic superhero franchises.

I generated over a thousand images in order to get the ones that you see in the result above. It takes a lot of trial and error, but with the right patience and tweaks I think it's possible to get a polished and visually consistent result.

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(2) To stitch together the images into a comic book style I tried many different tools but eventually settled on Figma, which has the best grid management of any tool I've found. It makes it very easy to align things properly and get a very clean look. And what's even better is that it's free to use (at least for my purpose & setup).

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If you'd like to learn anything more about my process, please let me know in the comments below.


I hope you enjoyed and look forward to hearing your feedback!

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Fantastic!

Thank you!

Impressive final result 👏 That must have taken up a lot of time. Great job

!PIZZA

Thanks @heroldius! Yep it took lots of time, but it's been a lot of fun as well :)

not gonna lie this is pretty bad ass!

Thank you so much! Glad you like it!

WOW!
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You did a good job. 😀
It must have taken a lot of time, how long did it take?

Thank you!!

I'd say it was probably ~15-20 hours total, though it could be more... I did it over several weeks, in little bits. A lot of it is waiting for image generations and retrying. The framing bit was the most fun and didn't really take too long once I figured out the system.

Awesome work bro! Vonak !BBH

Amazing work, it looks like done by a professional comic book artist. Only Midjourney can do consistent images? Other AI tools don't make it this good.
!BBH

Thank you @logen9f ! Yeah I feel Midjourney is the best to maintain consistency. You can set 3 types of "reference" images with every prompt, including character references, which helps massively.

wow. So awesome that I am speechless.

Thank you so much! This is motivation to keep going!

Its so impressive. Looks just like a comic !

Thanks so much! That was the goal :) Glad you like it!

Wow!! This is so inspiring.
I mean I did tried a fan fiction for SL but after episode 01, I stopped.
The idea was to take the MC into a journey across all splinters. But your comic is asking me to give the story a chance again. ❤️☮️

How much time did you spent learning how to use midjourney and Figma? Or you have a background with the tools.

You absolutely should!

I had experience with Midjourney as I've used it for a few years, but frankly it's rather simple to ramp up but tricky to master. However if you're patient and try again and again you eventually get used to it. I think you'll need a paid plan though to really learn as you need to do lots of generations to see what works and what doesn't. You also need to go in with a clear plan in your mind, or you'll always come out of it feeling like the results were random.

As for Figma I had zero experience with it, but it really just took about 30 minutes to an hour to get up to speed with what I needed for it, since mainly I just used it for grid alignment. I've been learning quirks and hotkeys along the way, so now after using it for maybe ~5-10 hours I'm much quicker.

Hope to see some of your content soon!

I should practise image generation on some other tools before going for Midjourney. And once I have an understanding of what I am looking at I should be able to convey the story. 😂
And now I understand what you mean by requiring patience. Because this is not what I had in my mind LoL!!! I have a lot to learn.

A big thank you, for guiding me. This means I will keep on bothering you for one thing or another in future. 😂
❤️☮️

Yep, lots of patience and trial and error, but it starts to come together over time! Try to apply specific illustration styles in your prompts as well to get more precise results. E.g. you could say something like "comic book style", or "style of the game {game name}", or "illustrative style of {artist name}". Find things you like and apply those styles in your prompts.

I get it now, It took me 26 tries to get something close to my vision. It is not perfect. The 2000+ images now make sense to me. Thanks for the tip.
I wonder to what extent we can control the background of the image. I saw your comic and the details are mind-blowing its like each background is matching with the story and the consistency is amazing. Like with 26tries, all backgrounds are different for me. It would be difficult if the same scene were to be continued with the characters. I am excited and dreading at the same time. LOL!!!

I like it! What styles did you apply?

I went with "Dark Manga style". I generated 6 images and this one resonate more with me idea.

wow!! thats awesome
I play quite a bit with the AI image generating software.
I paint, but i can't do illustrations and i have often dabbled with the idea of kids books or comics.
the AI software is getting so much better and there is a lot of skill and time in getting the generations consistant in theme and also getting the characters to look the same in each page.

that is where i struggle getting consistent characters.

well done. that looks awesome.

LOVE the splinterlands theme (naturally)

BLINGIT

Thanks @blingit!

Yeah AI is getting to a point where it can really complement our existing skills & make up for any skills we don't have, so that we can actually build end products that we previously imagined but couldn't quite do on our own. It's pretty amazing. And yes, the consistency aspect was until recently one of the missing pieces. While it's not perfect, Midjourney does allow you to get a fairly good amount of consistency by using scene/image/character reference images in your prompts.

Ive played around with it a bit. Certainly in the early days it was pretty shite to be fair, although that also might have been my skills. I have not revisitied consistent character generation with any degree of effort in about 6 months. I think it might be time to.

thanks again

BLINGIT

It's a great time to be revisiting it. The tools have come a really long way.

Wow! This is actually great work!

Thank you @hatoto!

 3 days ago  

Dude. Artwork. Storyline. Artwork!

Only one thing wrong with this comic book - Atuat doesn’t lead any parties! ;)

Seriously amazing work, BT. Already waiting for the graphic novel’s release. Well done!

Haha, love it 😅

FWIW Atuat's in there because he is in the official lore. But hey, maybe this is his time to shine!

Thanks for the encouragement man, means a lot.

 2 days ago  

Perfectly content to see Atuat own the lore! Not quite on Dallan's level of soft-spot, but homie's certainly got one from TPG, too.

And, man, 100%! I've got my credit card at the ready and/or my finger on the SPS trigger waiting for Praetoria's first graphic novel!

wow amazing, and also the character and style consistency, well done :)

Thank you so much! Glad you like it!

This is soo cool! Keep it up!

Thank you!

Good stuff! Looks amazing!

Thank you!!

Wow, very cool and impressive what you can do with AI. Also the short video where great keep it coming 😍.

Thanks so much @beaker007! I wish I had >24 in a day, then I'd make it all! Sadly I still also have a full time job that keeps me quite busy, so it's hard to keep up with all these projects 😅

Looks great, must have taken a massive amount of work!

Thank you! It was indeed a lot of work, but it was fun and I learned a lot, so it was worth it!

Taking the learnings and going forward will make it easier but still congratulations on all the hard work, had dreams of writing my own comic 20 years ago, perhaps your process will give me a chance to do it 😄

Do it! It's so gratifying to see your imagination come to life!

BRO THIS IS SO SICK!!!

That was before I read it and just glanced at the overview...

HOLY CRAPOLA BRO!!! THIS IS AWESOME!!! LIKE MEGA AWESOME!!

PLEASE @ ME FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT!

Haha, thanks so much cap, always love reading your comments. I'll try to remember to tag you next time! :)

Please do!!

That was a PHENOMENAL piece of work!!

🙏🙏🙏

This is amazing 😍 nice job man, sersly high quality stuff

Thank you @star-shroud!! <3

The beginning kind of reminds me of that one avengers where Loki opens a portal in the sky and all those aliens come through!

Srsly tho I really think something like this has the potential to draw in new players. From like a new angle too. The story and the lore has to be a critical part to our success. At least I think so. And the way you've presented here is could be really appealing to a certain group of people (like myself!) and maybe could get them interested in the game just because they're into the story. Solid stuff 👏 I hope that you keep going!

Thank you, I will certainly try to keep it up!

Nicely Done!

Thank you!

good job

Thanks!

Outstanding Brave, this is an amazing achievement! Thank you for using your time and passion to create such a masterpiece!

Thank you @davemccoy! Means a lot to hear you say that. I'm getting tons of extra motivation from these kinds of comments!

I love that you are motivated, you are leading by example! ❤️💪

As a 30+ year Spawn fan. I approve this message.

Thanks @clayboyn! I approve this comment!

You have a real talent! Hats off to you and BRAVO! 👍

AWESOME!! Absolutley beautiful work! This is amazing, and something the community has been hungry for for years! I would love to see this continued, I might even hope the team would support this and work it into the website somehow (even via link - I think this would be a great HOOK for new players)!!

Thanks Jimmy! I would love for this to provide some intrinsic value to the game itself. I'll ping Nate & Blaze to see what they think :)

Very Cool!

Thanks so much!

This format is best to introduce the lore and gain a following.

Appreciate it man! I agree it could be a nice way to intro new players into the game.

Thats awesome ... This gonna make a reels....

Thanks @axemaster88! That's the plan!

nice one - you did that all by yourself? Stunning

Thanks Uwe! Yep, with the help of AI :)

!PIZZA

Looks great!

Thank you @tarazkp, great to see you here! :)

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PIZZA!

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