AI Turns Sketches Into Photorealistic Landscapes

Do you need to put together a mood board or share some ideas with regards to the location you're looking for? Soon, it'll be possible to draw some lines and have it generated by AI. This video shows what's to come. 

You get three tools: a paint bucket, a pen, and a pencil. That's all you need to sketch the scene and have the AI generate the composite image for you to use. Nvidia has technology that produces results that are unique to the input. In other words, it gives you a waterfall if you chose water and draw from top to bottom. A circle filled using the paint bucket will give you clouds. 

It also picks up on two users drawing the same scene and will go about changing parameters to generate unique images. Nvidia used images from Flickr's Creative Commons to train their neural network. It's possible to change the season in the app, and the trees will lose their leaves. 

I can imagine this technology being great for composites. I think this should be seen as an add-on when it becomes available to the public, letting us show what we are thinking of in a mood board or storyboard. 

Wouter du Toit's picture

Wouter is a portrait and street photographer based in Paris, France. He's originally from Cape Town, South Africa. He does image retouching for clients in the beauty and fashion industry and enjoys how technology makes new ways of photography possible.

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6 Comments

This is awesome.

"You drew that with MS Paint?!"

A lot of designers, photgraphers, retouchers and art directors will be losing their jobs to AI in the next few years as companies "cheap out" their media production budgets and rely on such tools at the hands of art student interns.

Only when intellectually-driven jobs are threatened will a guaranteed income supplement and even salary become commonplace for many upper class societies. That is the one ideal Modernist end result of automation. For what is the point of machines producing products like cameras if there are less and less people to purchase them?

We'll see, won't we?

Scary stuff.