Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator

[lyogavin]

I tried to build AI game animation generator last year ( 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!

[doctorpangloss]

There 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]

I 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%2...

[palmfacehn]

Great 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]

Thanks 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.

[bitwize]

Hand-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]

Adobe 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.

[Cloudef]

Not 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.

[bigcat12345678]

Hmm 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_ema...

Also, I cannot find my queuing job after closing the page.

[lyogavin]

sorry for the inconvenience.

I've fixed it.

ALso given your account 2x more credits.

[lyogavin]

checking

[elpocko]

What 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.

[9283409232]

It'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]

will add a quality upscale model to fix it. thanks.

[zoba]

I’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]

we'll add top down, isometric and other views

[thrance]

The 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.

[nkrisc]

It’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.

[archerx]

As someone who is an artist and also a programmer I find the differences between both very different. I never see programmers crying over A.I. chiming “they stole our code so it’s evil and I’ll never use it and neither should you!” Like the artist seem to do.

I don’t really care if the image gen models are trained on my renders or photos as long as they are open source.

Also I have been making the assets for my game which needs at least 2,000 sprites and honestly it’s very tedious and I’m looking to automate as much of the pipeline as I can so I welcome anything that removes the the tedium and pain from the process.

[Aeolun]

Unless 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.

[brookst]

Can you point me to these artists who created new work out of nothing, without learning from other art themselves? Because every artist I know has worked hard and learned from what’s gone before.

[bayarearefugee]

Even as someone who leans generally anti-corp I would love to see Capcom come in and sue over this since there's no way to look at those demo animations and not see the "training" was entirely lifted from the Street Fighter series.

[akritrime]

Imagine if writers complained that stuff they wrote were being used in literature classes that teaches people how to read and write because how sentences they once toiled over for hours would now be used in mundane letters.

AI can't take away an artists creativity, just like how photography didn't kill painting. Yes, it closes up certain avenues on how artists make money but it will most probably make up for that by making them more productive.

[MasterScrat]

Congrats 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?

[nurettin]

It 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.

[alstonite]

Does this have plans or support for Aseprite? The workflow of uploading an aseprite file, adding an animation, and getting it back would be incredible.

[sambeau]

This is so depressing.

Also, why does the female ninja suddenly grow a penis?

[akritrime]

Is this using OpenAI's GPT-image or something different?

[iandanforth]

All 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]

You'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.

[Aeolun]

I really want to see an example with a slime. I’m sure it’d butcher it, but it would be so funny.

[educasean]

The example sprites aren't loading for me. I see original panda and the female ninja graphics, but the 6 sprite boxes are empty.

[lyogavin]

thanks for letting me know. I'll put some CDN to the videos.

[ofjcihen]

You wouldn’t happen to have vibe coded this would you? I can’t get a response from multiple pages.

[imetatroll]

I would like to know what sort of AI is trained to do this.

[highway900]

> 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]

This is awesome, good luck with this tool. Can it do isometric and top down views?

[lyogavin]

working on adding those

[mclau157]

really the space for 16x16 sprites with AI has not been done very well so far

[Dwedit]

miaomiaoPixel_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.

[okkdev]

I 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...

[miohtama]

The 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.

[makerofthings]

Have 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.

[yreg]

> Generating art solves no real problem

It definitely does solve a problem. This tool provides affordable custom sprites with fast delivery.

If it didn't solve any problem there would be zero demand for it and no reason for you to care about it.

[Aeolun]

I think the problem is that the profession is struggling because you pay a lot of money for work that is often of very dubious quality.

I can’t ask a anyone that claims to be a pixel artist for sprites because the chance of getting garbage is just too high.

Btw, if anyone does know someone good, I’m open to paying xD

[Minor49er]

I guess we should also delete Stack Overflow while we're at it because programmers should write everything from scratch for the same reason

[graynk]

> solves no real problem

this is very obviously not true.

[banner520]

I operated for 30 minutes, but it didn't achieve the result I wanted

[lyogavin]

sorry, there were way too more requests than the compute power i prepared for. New GPUs are added. you can give it a try

[doublerabbit]

The 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]

sorry, just fixed it.

[DrSiemer]

Settings 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]

fixed setting and profile.

sorry for the long waiting, I didn't thought there would be so many requests. Added more powerful GPUs.

[huhtenberg]

Curious 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]

sorry, 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.

[WithinReason]

Hope someone makes a celebrity Mortal Kombat game from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYfFDvtZ5s

[lyogavin]

cool. great to know. will msg you, we can chat more.

[elpocko]

If your work is of so low quality that an algorithm that only generates "shitty art" (by popular consensus) puts you out of work, then you don't deserve to get paid for your "art." It's Schrödinger's art: it's really bad and good at the same time, good enough to put artists out of work.

People don't get paid for work that machines can do. It's not a novel concept.

[ramoz]

I’m not an expert in this space, but I’ve been buying human-made sprites from https://itch.io/game-assets

Does anyone else have any good recommendations?

[bobxmax]

I 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.

[Madmallard]

I'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