Just yesterday Zeno_42 challenged me with the idea of revisiting some older characters/teams, with some of the newer renderers available to us. Well that was a fun idea! In two years the quality of renderers available has improved dramatically.
And as it turns out, I’d been playing around with one such team. Some readers may remember Aias and the Aliens from an Icewind Dale run that started in November 2024. I’m thinking of re-using them in a Gold Box game, at some point in the future. As you may recall, this was the most “out there” sort of team I’ve done. And adapting them to a Gold Box game will present some problems, in part due to backdating to 1E rules.
I had initially thought I’d have this post up “right away”, I’d already done a number of renders with the newer GPT Image 2.5. But some of that was about adapting them to a different game, and *none* of it was about recreating IWD in particular. So my tinkering around got more involved, and I went to bed last night still mulling over how to handle some renders I thought were already done.
Anyway, I have now put together the set I wanted. For all six of The Aliens, I will show their original portrait, that portrait redone with GPT 2.5 in the photo realistic style I tend to favor, and then a new render from the description but NOT with the reference image. Sometimes slightly enhanced to feature or change details… to get things just right.
I’ll also include some images by pairs and one of the whole team. Something that used to be impossible!
The last render is the prize. That’s THE big thing we can do now that we could not two years ago. The pairings are more a demonstration of character stability. We can take those portraits and put them into a scene, and actually expect the scene to look the same as the portrait(s)! Bonus, we can put any combination of characters in those scenes. No doubt, more characters is more work, but it is doable with the current renderers.
Stability used to be such a fight. You could learn words and phrases to *mostly* get the same effect. But there was always a random element, and certain results were just difficult to get however you worded it. This team in particular, so many words had to be used in every description just to get the defining wierdness of the character(s) to look right, there was often not enough space left to actually DO anything with them! Now, since you can add reference images, stability is actually a reasonable goal.
I’d also mention, when I do them in a Gold Box game, this team will be different in several details from the IWD team shown here. The later images of Charity show a change I will likely go with. That is, I’m getting rid of the traditional “mage robes” kind of look and switching to something that looks more like an adventuring mage to me; tunic, pants and belt with pouches.
I’ll also add the disclaimer, I get that a lot of viewers don’t like the photo-realistic look as well. Maybe it lacks the dynamic color and drama we expect in “fantasy art”, or maybe its just purely a “style” thing. But I want to see my characters come to life, to see them breath. I like the gritty realism, often contrasted with a fantastical setting. Bringing *my* characters to life is exactly the thing I find deeply fascinating about these renders.
DavesGaming 
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