Pics 99: Rachel and Ariane as friends

After the stuff happens at the Top Club, Ariane and Rachel spend a week doing stuff as friends. This is sort of a montage of "friendly" activities: Going out to breakfast, going to the mall, going ice skating, watching videos.

Plot wise nothing happens, but every picture is a different setting and requires a fair amount of work as a result.

For example, the above picture's background was generated in AI. Stable Diffusion to be exact. The original picture used a photo of a college mall that someone posted as wiki commons as public domain, but since this is supposed to be the day after Christmas when the malls are still decorated, I wanted to redo it with the mall still decorated.

So I generated one. Actually I generated 20 and this was the best. One of the things they don't tell you about AI art is that most of the generated pictures are crap.  Only the actual good ones get shared, and even then they are often photoshopped to get rid of flaws. This one had an oddly shaped woman with only one leg, but Rachel is covering most of her.

AI art is very controversial, and there will be court cases and maybe even legislation this year that everyone hopes will resolve some of the controversies to no one's satisfaction (I plan to blog about this on my web site https://arianeb.com/category/ai-art/ ), but I don't foresee problems using an unrecognizable out of focus picture as a background.

This second picture at the mall is nearly the same as the original except I retextured practically everything. The poses pictures and camera angles are identical to the picture I originally did in 2015, because I remember spending hours trying to get the  camera angle and mirror just right to see the reflection of them and the Christmas tree in the background, and I wanted nothing to do with having to redo all that work.

It was bad enough that I had to change the lighting and had to position the white square lights so they wouldn't show up in the picture was hard enough.