DALLE Character Design troubles

I was dabbling in possibility with character design and character usage.

The off with their head attitude of DALL-E is a bit annoying and just a tiny bit concerning. :smile:

So for working with existing characters i had significant troubles with DALL-E

I was a bit experimenting with a character i drew.
Nothing i came up with where any help for me.

  1. First i tried some Variations

I know i am not great an artist but i found the “Variations” worse than my original drawing, and of no use to me.

Here i recognized again that since you can’t give any instructions to the “Variations” its more useful for general exploring and initial creative impulse than working with existing characters.
Such variation instructions could be:
“Other poses”
“Other cloths”
“Other hairstyle”
“In full body”
“Colored”
“Sketch to line-art”
For working with existing Characters it would be huge to be able to tell DALL-E that “this” is the Character Isabella use it in further context.
e.g. Isabella healing a wounded Bird, Isabella dancing on a market place etc.

  1. Than i wanted to alter details:



    Both tries where disappointing and no use for me.

  2. A new approach i wanted to see what i can do with a sketch. Not much it seams.
    Getting variations was disappointing.

Trying Edit to enhance or getting inspiration was also fruitless.


  1. Then i thought i could use a well known character and place her in different environments.
    It didn’t work.

Belle from “The Beauty and the Beast” (Disney Animated)



When i stopped telling DALL-E to put the Character in a pose and environment the Character at least got recognizable:

Elsa from “Frozen” (Disney Animated)
Elsa from “Frozen” (Disney) dancing on a medieval folk festival, full body, professional digital art


Who?

Elsa from “Frozen” (Disney), full body, professional digital art


Ok it is Elsa.

I also ran into not working well anti bias stuff. I don’t care about the skin or hair color and even a cross-gender variation could be fun. But this output just has nothing to do with my request. Avoiding biases should not ruin your request.

That said, in my opinion you should be able to get a consistent character with a distinctive hair/skin/eye color etc. if you want to. It would be helpful if you could lock a certain appearance.
This is interesting e.g. for P&P Archetypes, for Trading cards with recognizable Characters like the Planeswalkers or for Video Game concept arts.
Something like:" “Nissa” (MtG Planeswalker) soothing a “Wooly Thoctar”(MtG Beast)" Should give the right Person with the recognizable Beast.

What i wish for to work with characters:

  1. Altering the art style of the whole piece
  2. Sketch to line art
  3. Line art to color
  4. Locking a character for further usage
  5. Altering a character (pose, outfit, environment, hairstyle, skin tone etc.)
  6. Locking/ defining an art style
  7. Getting other characters in the same art style

I was not striking for quality in particular, more mere testing.

Is DALL-E just not meant for this?
Am i doing something fundamentally wrong?

6 Likes

I don’t think DALL E can do this yet, but it should!

I would LOVE and i am officialyl asking OpenAI for the ability to do things like the above including uploading a characters from an existing image, naming said character, having the ability to put said character into a scene with a text prompt

“Jack, wearing a cloak, enters the dark bar with surly looking aliens peering at him in the shadows”

DALLE should already know who Jack is and i can just stick him in scenes

PLEASE! Now that we are paying for it, we can ask for features right? lol ;p

1 Like