Umi AI: The Ultimate Character Creator

This is a followup to my previous post, the official launch of Umi AI! 

I was really tired when I wrote yesterday's post, so I didn't have the energy to actually discuss Umi AI's unique points. Why bother using Umi? Why not just make your own prompts? What the heck is a 'wildcard system' and why not just download the ones from the wildcard website and go from there?

Allow me to elaborate.

There are many character creators that have existed over the past 20 or 30 years. A few examples of 'really good ones' include Black Desert Online's character creator, The Sims 3 and 4, the Elder Scroll games, Destiny 2, Monster Hunter World, and so many other ones.

But all of these character creators have major limitations. These include:

Limited gender options. Black Desert online allows you to make beautiful women of one fairly standard body type, but men are underrepresented here. And wanting to make any other type of gender? Don't make me laugh.

Limited species. Want to make a demon character? An angel? An ogre? 99% of the time, you're locked to making a human. Even in really advanced creators, like Tekken 5's character creator, the best characters can still look memey or janky, not actually good.

Limited art style. Let's say you can make any character type you want in The Sims games. Do you know what the problem is? You're stuck with that cartoony Sims look. There's no option to switch to an ultra gritty and dark and realistic character artstyle, like in Darkest Dungeon, or a really stylized anime appearance.

Limited clothing options. Let's say you only want to make a really cute girl in Black Desert Online. Fair enough. But when you're inside the character creator menu, you only have maybe six outfit options for making a character. And probably none of them will be exactly or even remotely what you want.

Either extremely sexualized clothing, or unsexy clothing, or blotchy armor... you just can't seem to make the character look the way you want, even if their face and other attributes are 'correct.'

Just look at this list of video games with good character creators. If you can find any one of them that doesn't have 2 or more of the critical flaws I just listed, among others, I'll shut this whole project down on the spot.

But Umi AI is not restricted to those limitations. If you want, you can already make the character of your dreams with the basic WebUI, but Umi AI makes the process so much easier to get into compared to spending days and weeks finagling all the different options that you're sure to quickly learn how prompting works.

Here's a really cool lion warrior that looks like he belongs in a Shining Force anime.

Here's a painting-like image of the Cryoverse's Amelia Greyheart.

Here's a really creepy image of an undead guy with rotting flesh.

Here's a similar undead guy but in a gritty comic book style.

Here's the Cryoverse's Uzziel in a really slick hyper-detailed and glossy art style.

And finally, here's another undead guy, but in a horror-esque b/w monochrome style.

The things you can do with this technology are absolutely incredible, and we've only begun to barely tap the surface with it. But when we're being real with ourselves, can other character creators do this? Not that I have seen.

It's not the developers' fault. They have to make each individual asset in their games. Making a single black cat-ears head accessory costs dev time. Adding a new hairstyle takes time. They also cost money.

With Umi AI, the limitations have been effectively removed. Now you can create any character you like. The only limitation is your imagination. (As well as wrangling the AI to actually make what you tell it to make and not some other random thing instead!)

But why even bother using Umi AI? Why not just prompt out your own character using the basic WebUI? Who even is the target audience for this?

I see these people as all getting a huge benefit out of Umi AI.

1. People who keep trying to prompt characters but have frustrating results.

2. People who, let's be honest, lack creativity and want to get a basic design out that they can fine-tune.

3. People who just want to see what cool things the AI randomly spits out. Heck, it recently popped out this cool robot/doll lady who I thought looked badass. Sometimes it's awesome to just see what the AI gives you.

4. Landscape lovers. Want to see cool cities? Breathtaking vistas? We've got you.

5. Space, the final frontier. Space battles. Black holes. Nebulae. You can expect me to add a LOT of cool space imagery prompts into Umi.

6. Prompt creators looking for new ideas to pull from.

7. Furries/scalies, other types who have historically had a LOT of trouble getting good quality art made of the things they want. It's hard making characters that look good. Now you can, at a minimum, pop out a design you really like before passing it on to an artist to fine tune and redraw!

8. And yes. NSFW-lovers. There will be plenty of that.

The problem is, people look at AI, and their thoughts are astonishingly basic and surface-level. Umi AI is all about breaking long-held limitations. My goal is to make a system that can output infinite creativity. The AI's releases are just tools, it's up to you to decide how to use them afterward.

Umi AI can output NSFW content, but so can WebUI at base. The real power of Umi AI is how it will act as the greatest character creator and generator up to the current point in human history!

UPDATE: This was originally a large guide-focused section. No more! Please refer to the appropriate guide for how to use Umi AI on Github!

https://github.com/Klokinator/Umi-AI/wiki/Umi-AI's-Tagging-System 

Umi now uses a YAML Tagging system that is extremely simply and versatile! Refer to the guide to learn how it works!

As you can see, Umi AI is actually a massive interconnected system, and what I've built is only the basic framework for what comes next. In the future, this system will have:

1. Countless species from DND, LOTR, Warhammer, you name it.

2. Far more artstyles, posing options, background specifics, and so on.

3. Many more SFW and NSFW poses. I'm looking forward to making battlefield scenes that can generate dynamically, in much the way images like this appear.

4. Split the gender options more appropriately. Right now, all options are unisex, but soon enough they will be male, female, and unisex. I mean, I'm cool with girlboys and boygirls, but it's also nice to have the gendered options too!

More, more, more! With the press of a button, I want to make Umi AI generate massive universes of extremely consistent quality. In fact, that is my #1 goal. I don't add scenes or poses or anything else unless I think it tends to come out in a consistently good manner.

In the future, I will be writing guides on how to submit prompts to the Umi AI Discord, as well as how to Inpaint properly, how to do img2img stuff, which by the way looks like this:

Yeah. That's right. Draw a doodle of a character and watch it transform into the thing you want. It's kinda bonkers this is the future we live in.

Anyway. I hope this post has better explained what Umi AI is, its unique selling points, and why it is a huge innovation for character creators, concept artists, and people of all other types!