Tool Ren'Py 2D character creation and tools

[man1vela]

Hey guys!

I’m currently working on my first game and I’ve hit a bit of a wall when it comes to designing characters. I’m not very skilled at drawing, and I’m also unsure which tools or software I should use to create them.

I’m looking for something beginner-friendly or even AI-powered that can help generate 2D characters. Ideally, I want them to have a body style similar to characters from Rogue-like: Evolution or Rick and Morty: The Pervert Infinity Curve, among others.

Does anyone have suggestions for tools, software, or even AI platforms that could help with this? I’d love to hear what you all use or recommend!

 

[paparabos]

I am searching for this kind of tools too, so I will stick on this thread hoping for anyone reply.

Overall I think the best case would be a AI which you input a raw drawing (like position of the body or something like that) and with that generate a image.

 

[osanaiko]

There's a few posts or threads around that discuss using how to get started with AI tools to make 2d images. I won't repeat the content here, use your google-fu.

(for the record I've got GPU hardware that is more than capable of doing the work, so I use package "Stability Matrix" to setup a local install of Automatic1111+stable diffusion, and then use a SDXL 1.0 model called PonyDiffusionXL with a LORA and some controlnet plugins.)

It's possible to use very rough drawings combined with prompts to describe features, and get output that looks good (if you like AI style) with a variety of art styles or artist look-a-likes.

However it's much harder to achieve any consistency between images - the AI generator has no ability to persist minor details, such as the details of a clothing item, or the shape of hairstyle. The only way I know to get any consistency in the final images is to spend a lot of additional time doing manual edits and/or combining elements from different generated images and then pushing the "franken-image" through the ai generator again to smooth off the transitions.

An example of this consistency problem is illustrated here: https://f95zone.to/threads/how-i-ma...er-friendly-guide-30-sexy-comic-pages.254492/
I'm not specifically calling out the "artist" for this, but if you look at the panels of the comic closely you'll see how only the broadest strokes of the heroine image (Blonde sexy elf, purple eyes, gold bikini, gold loincloth) are the same between frames, while a leather belt appears and dissappears, armor parts sometimes appear, her top changes between strapless or strapped every frame, etc etc. The background is also constantly changing in a non-physical reality way.

It's possible to persevere and achieve consistency, but it takes a lot of time and effort. if you are interested to learn more, I've written a lot about my processes in my own dev thread, linked in my sig.