DavesGaming

3 responses to “Astolpho: Update 4”

1. 

   Zeno

   March 22, 2025

   Those are fun! Eriksen in particular looks good, as do Patrick getting ready to fire and Marcus’ flames. I find “Keith Parkinson style” generally good at special effects, and not-so-good at facial expressions. But especially when you want wispy fog effects, mist, spirits, magic duels, etc. it works pretty well. Particularly something like “Keith Parkinson oil painting”.

   I find “blurred motion” does a lot for action scenes, as do phrases like “spinning in blurred motion” or “slashing in blurred motion” when you want to specify the focus of the action. “spinning in blurred superspeed” and the like can really accentuate things as well. I also get a *lot* of mileage out of “tackling”. Its a really strong modifier that works much more broadly than the meaning of the word. And it helps to describe both what the offensive character is doing and what effect it is happening on the defensive character.

   Basically any time I want somebody aggressively attacking in melee I do something like (norse warrior man,slamming with hammer) tackling (large muscular orc,axe,falling back).

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   1. 

      atcDave

      March 22, 2025

      Dang, you are on a whole other plane for figuring this stuff out! Tackling would not have occurred to me as helpful. And you seem to think in adjectives. I’m amazed at how vivid and controlled your scenes often are.

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      1. 

         Zeno

         March 23, 2025

         Thanks 🙂

         I just think of it like a probabilistic programming language. Each word just nudges the odds in a general “direction” – which vaguely corresponds to the english meaning of the term. So I just over time get a feel for what each word tends to actually *do*, and then use the words and order to push the pictures in the direction I want to go. Its thinking of it like actual sentences and phrases that leads to frustration. The AI hasn’t a clue what it “means” in that sense. Its more like picking ingredients for gumbo. Hmm. a little bland. Needs a little more “slash” and “tackle”.

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