Welcome to 2024 | Bad Apple render | AI stuff

# First of all, im sorry for being inactive for almost whole 2023. Year was quite a downer and i had no motivation to do anything pretty much. Also i was, and still am, busy with a contract job i got thanks to friend! It's AI related, and so far i love it.

# 2024 welcomed me with unreasonable amount of motivation for no apparent reason, and i was doing various projects left and right last week. Bad Apple render is one of them. I used it to learn mass automation in Gaea, which will be extremely useful for my future projects, including assets.

# Time to also address some AI questions and thoughts.
It will be a lie, if i said that i don't love it. It also would be a lie, if i said that it is completely justified. It will be a lie, if i said that it will go away at some point.
AI is with us to stay, it doesn't need to be good or bad thing, it is yet another leap in technology and it wont stop anytime soon. I am a bit deep in image generation AI, it's fascinating stuff, especially all the intricate mechanics that are not visible to common user. It is one of the tools that are deeper and wider in it's capabilities than any other for those who wish to learn it beyond "click and forget".
Will i continue to use AI? - Absolutely.

I will start to release some posts with models as well. I am one of very proficient AI trainers, and i have means to bring you some good models that you can utilize for cartography needs.

First of them will be related to cartouches. I already have prototype that produces awesome reference material, and it will only become better as i improve training ways, develop new features, improve dataset and captioning.
But be not discouraged, that particular model was trained only on public domain images.

Overall, i want to help transition to those who want in cartography community to usage of lite AI models. They will not replace anything or anyone, but are a good tool for reference imagery.

I will not be posting models unrelated to cartography on Patreon in any near future, so you don't need to worry about seeing content unrelated to cartography in some way or another.

Also i'll attach one basic example of output from cartouche model. But it will need a retraining, as i've developed feature that improves training quite a bit some days ago.