Daz 3D Launches Daz AI Studio - AI Art Generation Made Easy?

Daz AI Studio uses 3D content to influence
2D text to image generations.

Better known for their completely free, 3D animation studio, Daz 3D have launched their own browser based, AI text to image generator, Daz AI Studio.

All you need is a Daz 3D account to get started for free. Upgrade to a Premium plan for a small monthly fee for additional features. 

At the time of writing Daz AI Studio is still in Beta so there are some features, yet to be released, that are standard on other dedicated AI image generator sites.

While Daz AI Studio only produces 2D images, what makes it unique is that it has been trained on 3D content that helps guide the output. In particular you can select actual 3D character models as part of your settings and get fairly consistent images of that character every time.

The About page suggests you'll also be able to select 3D environments and lighting settings to further influence your generations but these options were currently not available, as shown in the free version, and weren't listed as Premium only features either. As far as I'm aware, at this time, you can't feed any Daz3D content you've purchased into your AI generations either.

Interestingly you don't need to select any character in the settings and the studio will still generate character images based on your prompt. Working much like any other AI image generator.

Important: At the time of writing Daz AI won't store your image history for any length of time beyond the current session. If you even refresh the AI Generator page your image history will vanish!

I also found it to be very particular about using appropriate wording. Any prompt using even mildly suggestive words would appear to be working okay, but would fail to produce an image after the generation bar maxed out, eventually aborting the generation if you don't manually cancel it.

If your images don't appear within 10-20 seconds of the generation bars maxing out just assume the generation will be aborted and cancel it.

Daz AI Studio for Character Design

Download this Krea.AI generated
character for free.

I've been on a bit of a run of using AI image generators to create full body character designs for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5, so it seemed obvious to try getting a character posed in a front facing 'T' or 'A' pose that I could rig using my one character sprite method.

I thought I'd try prompting for my young female with pink hair and pigtails, influencer character, who wears a white crop top and pink tracksuit pants, that I made with Krea.ai (and you can download for free) to advertise my Animate Talking Heads Course in the Reallusion Marketplace.

One immediate problem with Daz AI was any prompt using mildly suggestive words like 'sexy' or 'big boobs' (which I use to try and stop my influencer character from looking like a pre-teen) would result in the generation being aborted. There are probably more general audience 'safe' words I could use but I just decided to not even try and wrote my prompts with completely family friendly language.

I'm not going to go into any great detail on my prompts or the progression of my generations suffice to say I could not get the character to stand in either an 'A' or 'T' pose but I did get some perfectly straight on, facing the camera, symmetrical, standing poses. I also, randomly, got the occasional character turnaround image, with four of the same character in one image from different angles.

To start with I did use Daz's free 3D, Victoria character but she wasn't really the look I was going for, so I ended up not selecting any of included characters at all. The image below is a collection of generation highlights.

Generation Highlights: The first two images use the Victoria 3D
model. The third image is the first without the model where I got
a random background of trees, so I added 'neutral grey background'
to my prompts after that. Note the random 'turnaround' multiple
character generations.

If I saw a generation I liked, I'd use the seed copy button for that image to generate variations. Note that, if you do this, you'll want to set the number of generations to four because at least one new generation will be an exact copy of the one the seed came from.

I saved the generations I liked using the upscale button on the image. It works exactly like the download button only it takes a moment to upscale, and you end up with a bigger, better quality image.

Next I decided to add a male influencer counterpart. I had better luck getting him closer to an 'A' pose but only because he was so muscular that seemed to be his natural stance.

I thought I'd try giving my female influencer a male counterpart. I liked the third image
for the face but probably one of the other bodies for rigging.

Daz AI Studio for Backgrounds/Environments

Since there are currently no real settings to influence your environmental generations with 3D models, generating environments is pretty much the same as any other AI tool.

I did notice that you can't really apply any artistic styles e.g. illustration, graphic novel etc. These would fail to generate. You really only have one style, 3D realism (and maybe Pixar as this term had some effect on my character generations).

Below is one generation of four images I did for my influencer couple's gaming room.

All of these were great but I particularly like the second image.

Rigging the Characters for Cartoon Animator 5

Characters with a photographic, or 3D character quality are a little harder to rig in Cartoon Animator 5 if you want the joints to look more natural and less like paper doll puppets. Fortunately these characters were intended to be 'talking head' style characters, so it's really only the upper body, arms, and head that will be animated.

If you're interested to learn the full, one sprite process, I use for rigging this style of character I sell a Character Rigging bundle course in my Gumroad store.

One thing I did a little differently was swap out both character's hands for some free SVG sprite hands that come with Cartoon Animator. I was able to use the SVG Color editor to match the hands skin color closely to my characters, so now they both have a full set of hand sprites.

My finished, rigged, characters in their gaming room apartment. Notice both
characters have their original hands swapped for a set of color matched sprite hands.

Final Thoughts

Daz AI Studio is still in its early development stages. It does produce some really polished renders but even with the 3D character models I was still getting phantom hands and fingers occasionally.

It doesn't really compare to other AI tools out there yet but it has potential once their unique concept of training the AI on their 3D content is more completely implemented.

For now, it's mostly just a bit of fun and a curiosity.

o---o--- ---o--- o---

Did you find this article useful?
Subscribe to my newsletter and get the
latest articles delivered to your inbox.