Just want to add this real quick because it’s important.
I know it’s tempting to want to pirate this series but if you have the money then PLEASE don’t. Apple TV+ is only $5 a month so you can just pay for a month, watch the series (maybe multiple times) and then cancel. You could even just use the 1 week free trial if you need to. But please, let’s show the creators of the series (including actual paleoartists and scientists!) our support so that we can maybe see a season 2 or even a renewed interest in paleo media in general.
Hi everyone, hope you’re all staying safe and staying indoors during this pandemic!
I had a go at drawing a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in Paint (I based it on lots of different drawings and photos of skeletons I saw, but the one I used the most is the Nation’sT. rex at the Smithsonian. The leg stance is my own, so palaeotumblr, let me know if that’s anatomically impossible!)
After that I decided to have a go at giving it a body. I hope I didn’t make it too shrink-wrapped?
Palaeoartists - feel free to give me a critique so I can improve for next time!
A few things I opted to include, along with sources linked:
Neck ribs and gastralea (stomach ribs), which are delicate, hard to mount and often missing from museum skeletons!
Keratinised facial features are from this Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong video.
I tried to make it obvious that the eyes face forward, the hands are supinated, not pronated, and the feet are digitigrade - common mistakes in beginner dino art!
Possible mistakes I can see already, palaeotumblr let me know!
The tail looks way too thin to be an effective counterweight to that huge head, should it be thicker?
More keratin on the lachrymal than just that little eyebrow-like ridge?
Would the feathers stop there, or would they plausibly extend all the way down the dorsal side of the tail? I know the ventral side was scaly as we have impressions for that.
The teeth need to be more obviously heterodont, but that’s hard to draw in Paint!
Self-directed piece featuring two outdated Tyrannosaurs (Jurassic Park / featherless style) as a warm up for a bigger project to come. Available as a print at https://www.vectorthatfox.etsy.com
“Frodo Baggins delivering a pizza through the mines of Moria”
Remember my attempts to get CLIP+BigGAN to generate candy hearts? Here’s what an alternative method, CLIP+FFT, does with the prompt “a candy heart with a message”.
Rather than a single obsessively-scribbled-upon heart, we now have a vast universe of candy hearts, jostling against one another with their messages screaming incomprehensible love at the viewer.
As before, CLIP is the judge, telling another algorithm whether this collection of pixels looks more like “a candy heart with a message” than that collection of pixels. But this time, the algorithm presenting the images to CLIP isn’t steering through BigGAN, which was trained on a set of human photography. Instead, it’s doing something a lot more like the classic Deep Dream images, changing parts of the image to maximize how much it looks like dogs, or whatever the prompt is supposed to be.
And since CLIP was trained on text and images that appeared together on the internet, it can be the judge of just about anything.
Here’s “A stegosaurus flying a spaceship among lasers”.
And it knows how to judge pop culture figures and even the look of TV shows. Here’s “Godzilla and Paul Hollywood in the Bakeoff tent”
Note that it not only correctly has the tent as white and pointy-roofed, it even is trying to do the Union Jack bunting. And it’s really sensitive to the prompt, so if you type “Godzilla and Paul Hollywood taking a selfie in the Bakeoff tent” instead, Paul Hollywood breaks out into a grin and cameras appear. (it seems to be less sure what a grinning Godzilla looks like)
Here’s “Mr Darcy emerges from a lake in a white shirt while his horse looks on”
It does less well to my mind when there are fewer clues about what the background should look like. Tell it just to do “Tyrannosaurus Rex” and things get very abstract and smeary, and it even resorts to trying to write “tyrannosaurus” everywhere.
“A tyrannosaurus wearing a crinoline hoop skirt on a fashion show runway” looks a bit more realistic. Or maybe that’s just my preference. The trees in the background are a nice touch.
Here’s a zoomed-in view of one of the best ones: “a library made of bones and skeletons; a library in the style of catacombs”. It doesn’t seem to resort to word graffiti if the prompt suggests a finely textured background, maybe. (This may have been from a newer version of the CLIP+FFT notebook, so that could explain some of the improved quality.)
You do need a bit of imagination maybe to figure out what the original prompts were, so I wouldn’t exactly say that CLIP+FFT as successful as making images to order as the original CLIP+DALL-E (still not released publicly). But having a neural net that will attempt whatever I ask for (and not turn every human into a horror of many-eyed blobs) is still pretty fun.
“The daleks have filled the tardis with llamas and David Tennant is annoyed”
Read more about CLIP+FFT (built by Vadim Epstein) and try it yourself for free with the colab notebook!
I made a bonus gallery of various characters delivering pizza. Spider-man’s not the only one who’s recognizable with a fresh pie in hand. To see the gallery, and get other bonus content, become an AI Weirdness supporter! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.
I “recently” hit 2K followers on Instagram and asked my followers what they might want to see sketches of. The following are some of that requests filled out to what I would honestly call more than sketches. Really gotta learn when to stop myself.
Here it is, the final Jurassic June piece. And, instead of going for a baby, I gave the existing baby T. rex an edgy teen phase!
This juvenile T. rex is based on Jane, the fossil specimen argued to be a juvenile T. rex(orNanotyrannus to some). This makes the animal a lot more sleek and lithe, perfect for fast pursuits before it turns into a chunky tankbuster.
Now that the Pop Poke contest is over, here are some “concept art” and unused sketches from the planning process. I went with characters/creatures that I really like and that felt distinctly “me”. I figured I wouldn’t have to worry about other people picking the same characters, but someone did submit a Grievous line so that shows what I know lol.
Here we are, last stop on the JP Palettes train. The Holy Grail for every JP 90′s kid. At least as far as I’ve gathered.
Hot take: Rubber “real feel” skin is super overrated. Sure, flexibility, less seams, and “skin-like” material is neat, but it’s a lot less durable, easier to break, and paint can be susceptible to peeling. Nothing lasts forever, but I feel rubber has a real short shelf life.
Here’s a GIF going between the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World T. rex colorations. There’s a decent amount of discrepancies between the actual models, but these colors match up a lot better than I expected.
And, here it finally is, the last Jurassic Palettes piece. I may come back to this idea in the future but it’s so nice to finally have finished this project as originally planned.
The T. rex is my favorite dino in the series, so this one was especially fun to work on. Second to the raptors, it (understandably) gets the lion’s share of cool color schemes from the franchise.
Here’s an extra Male T. rex, this one’s more “generic” than the others. It follows the patterning most random merch from JP3 used (lollipop holders, things like that). There is a specific source, props to anyone who can guess what it is.
The Male Tyrannosaurs are done! T. rex has some killer color schemes across the franchise and there’s so much good stuff to pull from. I know there are still some iconic rexes left unaddressed by this post, rest assured they’ll be in the next (and, for the moment, final) piece.
This wee bab comes to us from the unreleased Night Hunters line, a follow up to the (surprisingly released) Chaos Effect line. There are like 2 promo pics I could find, and color schemes were conflicting. So, why not both?
Today, made a warm up involving everyone’s favorite dinos, specifically, how the ecosystems they lived in also contributed to to the adaptations that made the big predators the way they are!
T.rex lived in a time where it had to punch through armor and muscle with only its face, meanwhile Spinosaurus stuck to the water, because there was FAR less competition when on land, it ran the absolute gamut of large carnivores, from Carcharodontosaurus to Rugops
