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Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator
I tried to build AI game animation generator last year ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40395221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40395221), a lot of people were interested, but it failed, mainly because the technology was not good enough.
1 year passed, there were a lot of developments in video/image generation. I tried it again, I think it works super well now. Actually beyond my expectation.
You can generate all kinds of game character animation sprites with only 1 image.
1, upload your image of your character
2, choose the action you want
3, generate!
Support basic actions like Run, Jump, Punch and complicated ones like: Shoryuken, Spinning kick, etc.
High quality sprite sheet will be directly generated to use in Unity and any game engine.
If you are an indie game developer, you don't need to high an artist or animator to develop you game.
For studios, it's 10x cost saving and 10x efficiency as no more creating animations for 100 NPCs 100 times.
Please check it out, looking forward to your feedback!
- mclau157 1y agoreally the space for 16x16 sprites with AI has not been done very well so far
- Dwedit 1y agomiaomiaoPixel_v11 can generate sprites that small. Specify a size of 128x128, and that corresponds to an actual size of 16x16. Use an image editor to shrink the sprite down to 16x16, then reduce the palette as needed to remove the near-matching colors. 16x24 sprites end up looking a lot nicer though.
- doublerabbit 1y agoThe privacy pages and legal pages don't link. They all return to the homepage. Without them I am hesitant in uploading my concept art from my project for testing. Otherwise it is a cool concept and I would potentially look in to if it turns out you don't go all evil villain and claim ownership over the sprites. Enabling a preview set of sprites without having an account would do no harm neither. But creating an account without any legal documentation is a no from me as I don't know whats happening with my IP which leaves me uncomfortable. Even if it's not a ratified legal document; some draft is better than nothing.
- lyogavin 1y agosorry, just fixed it.
- WithinReason 1y agoHope someone makes a celebrity Mortal Kombat game from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYfFDvtZ5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYfFDvtZ5s
- 9283409232 1y agoIt's cool but you can tell the sprites are low quality and AI generated. They have that trademark AI "fuzziness." It's possible that players would think it is a design choice but it is noticable.
- lyogavin 1y agowill add a quality upscale model to fix it. thanks.
- iandanforth 1y agoAll AI tools I've tried have failed to generate animations for slimes in my experiments. (Including Veo3) I'm hesitant to even try this, any chance it would work?
- kevingadd 1y agoYou're going to have a much harder time getting good animations generated for something that isn't a humanoid, since the training sets won't have much to work from. It's possible with a really good prompt for 'slime' you could get something but this doesn't seem to allow prompt customization. If you're after monsters like slimes I would not drop money on this.
- Madmallard 1y agoLol it's not functional for most things. I uploaded a photo of a pixel art electrician and it just completely ruins it and looks nothing like my guy and forces it into a particular style where it looks like a cheap mobile game playable ad and somehow Mario at the same time. Not to mention, the actual animation is wrong too.
- Aeolun 1y agoI really want to see an example with a slime. I’m sure it’d butcher it, but it would be so funny.
- educasean 1y agoThe example sprites aren't loading for me. I see original panda and the female ninja graphics, but the 6 sprite boxes are empty.
- lyogavin 1y agothanks for letting me know. I'll put some CDN to the videos.
- huhtenberg 1y agoCurious idea, but doesn't seem to working for me. It's been sitting in "Your job is in queue" state for 10 minutes, and that's it. Reloaded the page just now and it just reset itself.
- lyogavin 1y agosorry, I didn't expect so many requests all queued up too long. I've added some servers it should start to process. When your request finish it'll send you an email notification.
- genewitch 1y agoThree things are known. Slashdot and HN effect and the gervais effect. Don't really get the mean-spirited comments. Not everyone has the means to exascale their project.
- elpocko 1y agoWhat model(s) does this use? Is it built using open source models and tools? I couldn't find any mention of models in the FAQ (who even asked those questions?) or elsewhere. I doubt you trained your own diffusion model. The GitHub cat in the footer does not link to GitHub either.
- DrSiemer 1y agoSettings page does not work. Profile page does not work. I've been waiting for my first test for 30 minutes now. Not a great first impression...
- lyogavin 1y agofixed setting and profile. sorry for the long waiting, I didn't thought there would be so many requests. Added more powerful GPUs.
- ofjcihen 1y agoYou wouldn’t happen to have vibe coded this would you? I can’t get a response from multiple pages.
- hbn 1y ago[flagged]
- ramoz 1y agoI’m not an expert in this space, but I’ve been buying human-made sprites from https://itch.io/game-assets https://itch.io/game-assets Does anyone else have any good recommendations?
- ramoz 1y agoAlso, I have a capability I'm sure is 100x the OP link. I've explored this space a bit. https://streamable.com/k5iny8 https://streamable.com/k5iny8 (2day expiry) Pretty much any character or animation. I don't feel compelled to share unless anyone in the relevant industry wants to collab, in favor of supporting human artists.
- bobxmax 1y agoI always find it funny that people are up in arms about artists supposedly losing their jobs, but have no problems with doctors losing their jobs to AI advancements. Replace the people who actually contribute to society and no issues, but god forbid the pixel artist can't get paid to doodle anymore.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoI think it's fair to feel bad for how AI is going to eat all of our lunches (either now or 5min from now). But at the end of the day, you either accept it or pitch an alternative. What's the alternative? Freeze tech advancement at 2020's tech in your country? At what expense, and for what gain?
- doctorpangloss 1y agoThere is a lot of negativity on Hacker News. Staying focused: the panda is wearing gloves, but then when it does the Hadouken and the Hurrican Kicks, it loses the gloves. Bigger picture this seems like a focus on product stuff like pricing and demos and navbars that don't really matter to artists or game developers. Your feelings are correct that people here - the root motivation of the negativity - are questioning your sincerity. With AI art this is acutely true, people don't view AI art as a sincere art endeavor. I don't doubt your sincerity. But spending more time on the art thing, and making it free or open source, it's going to look and feel more authentic.
- themanmaran 1y agoI think the negativity is overkill. I've been toying around with the exact same idea the last couple weeks. It's mostly GPT 4o image => some image cleanup, but honestly a lot more finicky than I originally expected. Lots of prompt engineering. So OP probably put in a fair bit of effort here. Also each animation probably costs $1-$2 in GPT costs to make [1], so not something that's easy to throw a free tier on. [1] https://openai.com/api/pricing/#:~:text=Image%20Generation%20API https://openai.com/api/pricing/#:~:text=Image%20Generation%2...
- gametorch 1y ago[flagged]
- lyogavin 1y agocool. great to know. will msg you, we can chat more.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gametorch 1y ago[dead]
- highway900 1y ago> This isn't putting anyone out of work. The games simply would not be made in the first place. The opposite is also true. Games that should never be made are being made due to the rubbish that can be generated by these tools. Observe the generated samples on the landing page, they are literally just copying street fighter. These tools are so useless without ripping off the hard work of humans. The deluge of slop is a signal to noise problem.
- imatworkyo 1y agoThis is awesome, good luck with this tool. Can it do isometric and top down views?
- lyogavin 1y agoworking on adding those
- bitwize 1y agoHand-drawn animation, whether for video games or television or other media, is one of those artistic fields where I can see AI being a huge win for everybody. The reason why is because drawing the in-betweens in an animation is tedious, time-consuming, costly, and, in most 2D animation productions, outsourced to sweatshops abroad. And yet it's most of the work that goes into an animation. I think most animators would rather just do the keyframes and leave the tweens in the hands of the machine. It'd make traditional animation as easy and fast as Flash animation, and create a flourishment of even more indie animations from solo creators with even higher quality.
- spacechild1 1y agoAdobe has been working on some real cool stuff like this. IMO, AI should be a tool to support the creative process, and not to replace it.
- imetatroll 1y agoI would like to know what sort of AI is trained to do this.
- banner520 1y agoI operated for 30 minutes, but it didn't achieve the result I wanted
- lyogavin 1y agosorry, there were way too more requests than the compute power i prepared for. New GPUs are added. you can give it a try
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Madmallard 1y agoI'm surprised posts like this aren't instantaneously flagged and removed. The tools for doing this are readily available for free as it is. This is basically another "throw AI in it" CRUD app that wants your money. They're all really low effort grifts that do not deserve to see the light of day. They work for a subset of animations that go in commonplace game types. Anything creative or new or different? No chance you'll get a satisfactory result. They are all subtly wrong in ways that anyone can easily spot and will likely get your game filtered out and harshly criticized publically on Steam or other platforms. This right here too is so egregious: https://www.godmodeai.cloud/plans https://www.godmodeai.cloud/plans
- bigcat12345678 1y agoHmm The payment link does not require login And I paid and the credits vanished into thin air ... To the poster, please find the customer service to fix https://buy.stripe.com/cNicN59Bqf6K4q92Qrbwk00?prefilled_email=justicezyx@gmail.com&client_reference_id=user_2yAB9vQfM1W5sXvTzYViOXzTodh https://buy.stripe.com/cNicN59Bqf6K4q92Qrbwk00?prefilled_ema... Also, I cannot find my queuing job after closing the page.
- lyogavin 1y agochecking
- lyogavin 1y agosorry for the inconvenience. I've fixed it. ALso given your account 2x more credits.
- taytus 1y agoShouldn’t it be more like 5x credits? That’s what I would have given to a paying early adopter dealing with these annoying issues.
- menzoic 1y agoCalm down it’s a 1 person company. The entitlement is over the top
- bigcat12345678 1y agoGot the credits! Thanks! I am researching the landscape for building a coding agent to generate social games, your tool is a nice coincidence. Good luck with the product!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thrance 1y agoThe samples on the landing page are... not good, by any metric. The background jitters, details go missing from frame to frame, and the animations that should cycle (run, walk...) don't look like they do. This is a prototype, at best. I would be ashamed of asking money for providing such a sloppy service. Also, in your faq you have "You own the rights to your generated content.", which I don't think is true. AFAIK, you can't copyright AI art.
- palmfacehn 1y agoGreat progress. Bookmarked. For purposes of generative worlds, I have an additional requirement for interchangable equipment and weapons. I.e. a single sword or armor sprite should fit with all humanoid characters, in all animations. I suspect this could be achieved by training against "clipping" tests. As a start, there should be projections for all four cardinal directions. Limit the output to palettes of a given size, for classic recolors via GL shaders.
- lyogavin 1y agoThanks for so many valuable points and ideas. Will do. I like the "interchangable equipment and weapons." idea, very cool. And yes. it's doable. many ways possible could work. I'll experiment.
- okkdev 1y agoI hate this. It's cool that it's possible, but I hate it. Generating art solves no real problem and only suppresses a struggling profession without which this wouldn't even be possible...
- makerofthings 1y agoHave to agree. I don’t think we should stop ai progress, just that I think we built a bad thing along the way. I will never buy a video game that I know has ai generated content, I want to see some art, not a soulless prediction of what art might look like.
- petesergeant 1y ago> I will never Bet you $10 that in five years' time you will have.
- makerofthings 1y agoIt's not really practical but I would take the bet that I will never /intentionally/ buy a game with AI generated assets. I just don't see that AI generated art has any value to it. I'm sure you could sneak some past me, it's getting harder to spot all the time.
- petesergeant 1y agoMy guess is that in five years’ time there won’t be any games that don’t include any, and also people will really have stopped caring so much
- miohtama 1y agoThe problem is that in the indie game market, where most 2d sprites are drawn, there is not enough money going around making many studios profitable. By reducing cost of manual 2d animation, more studios can be profitable and able to deliver better, more finished, games. Then studios can pay decent salaries to employees.
- kkarthik1999 1y ago[dead]
- Cloudef 1y agoNot sure about professional quality. All the results seem to need quite bit of hand editing to look good. Also the examples only show animations ripped from street fighter.
- sambeau 1y agoThis is so depressing. Also, why does the female ninja suddenly grow a penis?
- nkrisc 1y agoIt’s sad how the existing corpus of artists’ works are being used against them. The only reason this can generate images like these is because artists previously created artwork like this. And then in return they get: > you don't need to high an artist or animator to develop you game. Unless you created all the training material yourself, any model like this is highly unethical, in my opinion.
- Aeolun 1y agoUnless you didn’t want people to see and use it, maybe you shouldn’t have made it public? I don’t think training AI is fundamentally different from humans learning from things they see, and we don’t restrict that either.
- wrasee 1y agoThe fundamental difference is that computers can do this at a pace and scale that humans could never aspire to. There is a natural limit to the extent a single individual can be informed by previous works. It sets a natural pace to innovation that is sustainable for both the artist and derivative works. Computers have no such limitation and can consume almost the entirety of a subject’s work in a few weeks or months. I think that alone is enough to say that yes, it is fundamentally different.
- jason_oster 1y agoAutomated assembly lines have the same properties. Same with transportation. Buses, trains, airplanes, ships. These all work tirelessly at a pace that humans cannot match. There is no fundamental difference.
- wrasee 1y agoI think you missed the point. The claim is that AI training from public information is no different from humans learning from public information. My argument is precisely that the mechanisation of information is fundamentally different from the scale at which a human can learn. One immediate consequence being there is no longer a natural brake on the scale of what can be sourced for use in a derivative work. To be clear this is not a value judgement, just to point out that it _is_ different, just as driving is fundamentally different from what one can do with one’s own feet. Of course the mechanisation of transport is history and seems daft to argue against. But it is different. Whether that’s good or bad is a much harder question.
- MasterScrat 1y agoCongrats on shipping! I’d love to hear a bit about the ML side of things: what was your experience with various models? Do you see a clear cost vs quality tradeoff with current state of the art models? How do open vs closed models compare?
- zoba 1y agoI’m curious if you know of a similar tool for generating tilesets for top down RPG like games? I’ve tried Midjourney, which makes nice art, but it can’t be used in a game.
- lyogavin 1y agowe'll add top down, isometric and other views
- nurettin 1y agoIt kind of does what it says on the can, but you will have to edit the result frame by frame in order to make the lost scales and equipment consistent across all animations. Still, a huge time boost.
- akritrime 1y agoIs this using OpenAI's GPT-image or something different?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alstonite 1y agoDoes this have plans or support for Aseprite? The workflow of uploading an aseprite file, adding an animation, and getting it back would be incredible.