Alpaca is a powerful tool for concept artists due to its ability to quickly and extensively explore various ideas.
During a typical concept art processmany promising ideas are left unexplored due to time constraints.
Alpacahoweverenables rapid exploration of numerous ideasallowing for greater risk-taking while still ensuring a high-quality concept is delivered on time.
There are many different ways to integrate Alpaca in your processour tools are made so they can be leveraged at any point in your processbe it for a simple touchup or for a full render.
In this caseand for the sake of learningwe will use Alpaca all the way from silhouetting to final render.
Firstlet’s find a silhouette that we like.
We can sketch down a few very simple silhouettes and use Alpaca to render them in more details.
By setting Freedom to a medium valuewe can draw a very simple silhouettes and let Alpaca be a bit creative to refine it.
Now that we have a few silhouettes we likewe can start to render them to get a few details to show up.
We can render them in a single passor in multiple steps for more control
The knight concept appears promisingso we will continue to explore this one.
What would it look like if the knight had a sword and a metal helmet?
Let’s add those elements and have Alpaca render them.
HereI used Photoshop to paint the sword and helmetI could have used
Alpacabut it doesn’t yet have soft brush which I wanted to use here.
Thankfully going back and forth between Photoshop and Alpaca is very easyas
we can simply copy/paste the canvas from one to the other with ctrl+c/ctrl+v
on Windows or cmd+c/cmd+v on mac.
L. You can then highlight the area to render using the brush.
So farwe have explored in a pretty straight linerefining a single idea more and more.
Let’s see if we can spice things up a little bit by rendering some variations of our concept with different twists.
To do that we can set Freedom to a fairly high valuearound 30 or 50. This tells Alpaca to not be overly concerned about respecting our current input preciselyleaving space for interesting things to emerge. We can set Change around 75 or so.
Nowwe can reuse the same prompt we had earlier (knight with a swordfantasy characterblank background) but add a specific modifier we are interested in exploring in front of it.
This is nicethe dragon armor variation is pretty cool. But can we push this idea further?
Alpaca has another functionallity that we haven’t yet leverage in this project: Style References .
With Style References we can use other images to guide the of our renders.
Let’s see if we can use it to make our render a bit more fiery.
We are going to use the two following reference images (on Free and Standard plan you can only use a single reference image at a timebut that will still work just fine!)
We will upload the images to the references tool and set the reference strength to approximately ~20. A higher reference strength might reproduce some details from the reference image in the outputwhich we want to avoid in this case.
We will maintain a high value for Change (between 80 and 100) and afford some Freedom to Alpacaallowing it to render new details like flames (around 20 or 30).
Here are a few examples of renders we get:
This is pretty nice. But we’re going to stick with one of our earlier prototypical knights and make a few more modifications to reach our final design. These will include giving our knight glowing eyesgiving them a larger broadswordand adjusting the armor to be a bit spikier.
These changes can be easily made using the Generation Mask technique we’ve previously discussed.
And here is our final render
