Now I can 100% say that Retro Diffusion has the highest quality in the pixel art AI gen world. - Industry leading image gen with RD Pro - The highest quality animations with RD Advanced Animation - Custom styles that adapt to your examples Making things is so easy right now 😎

The animation model is live on the site and API! Generate full 4 directional, 4 frame walk animations in ~30 seconds (nearly 15x faster than anyone else 👀) with one click! More in 🧵!

I just took ~30 minutes to put this together. All assets are 100% generated with Retro Diffusion, no touch-ups, I just moved them around and added some transitions :)

Final version of the #pixelart AI model in @nashor_kim's style. Pretty happy with it now, I think it has a lot of the identifying features. Super cool of Nashor to invite people to train on his art, and I hope this model helps inspire him. It was only trained on 81 images. 👀

You can use input images for animations now! And, it gives you a spritesheet along side the animated gif for easy use :) In the API, you can pass "return_spritesheet = true" to get the sheet instead of a gif.

This new model is INSANE. (coming soon™️) Look at the dithering. That's done in-model, and its perfect. It even hit the perfect bayer 8x8 pattern in the top left. I promise, there is not a single other AI tool out there that can do this, or even come close.

Wondering how long it will take for someone to use this to build an open world game with real-time generated npcs and player characters... Could probably make something passable in a few hours of vibecoding

If you're building pixel art generative games, you just can't even come close to beating the quality, consistency, or cost of Retro Diffusion's images and animations. Not a single manually placed pixel in this whole demo. All assets are 1st try, 1st prompt, no cherry-picking.

Hey, I’m the model creator, and I’m doing my best to both use the incredible technology AI is, and keep it ethical and respectful of artists and their work. Please don’t make a blanket statement like this. You didn’t even reach out to learn about my product or how it was made.

Work in progress dedicated top down model looking awesome!

We've just launched maybe the craziest model yet on the Retro Diffusion site and API! Generate amazing pixel art VFX animations from just a prompt, a reference image, or both! More below!

Here's a fun tip for anyone making games right now- while it might be a challenge to describe video game levels in a way Retro Diffusion understands, you can use RD to convert images generated from other sources by using the "Input Image" section!

Coming soon to #RetroDiffusion you'll be able to take non-pixel-perfect images from generators like #DALLE3 and easily convert them into pixel perfect generations that you can actually use! Downscaling (even using AI) can't even come close to this level of quality.

For anyone who might have missed it before, we have 4 directional walking animations on the site + api. Generations are over 15x faster than anyone else, and way more consistent, with a (subjectively) better and more authentic pixel art style.

Behold, how *not* to do a pixel art model. You could do this with downscaling + color clamping instead of burning GPU to do the same thing less efficiently... Yikes

Here's a longer video showing off the image editing tool! It should be out in the next few days.

Except not a single one of those pixel are actually pixels and properly usable in a game... People still don't get that for something to be pixel art it needs to have consistent sized pixels 🙄

I just wrote a little python script to generate expressions like this from a portrait image, you can find it on my github. I'll put the link below.

HUGE news! Not only does the site have a whole new model (RD Plus) with 11 new styles, it also has a new generation panel that looks and feels awesome to use! Examples below! 😎

Just told someone about this in a reply, but its a really cool technique others should know about. If you set the seed number, and change the prompt, you can get just the changes you want. Here's me changing the shirt color, hair color, pants, etc while keeping the same dude.

This is hard to post, but I'm feeling a bit demoralized lately. There's so many features I want to add, and things to test, but it feels like I can get 95% of the way done with a new tool or process, just to get hit with inconsistencies from the model or the way the service I use runs the model. I've had 4 different animation models ready to go, just to get into testing and find out that 1/8 of the time, the model just straight up doesn't work. Or it does work, but the quality is super degraded and its not consistent. I can't release those models and myself and NeriJS have already poured so much time into them its a real setback. At the same time I'm scraping things because the quality doesn't meet my standards, there's like 10 new services a day that are just completely vibe-coded-half-working sites using video models to produce mushy, smeary, misaligned 'pixel art', and people seem really excited about them. It's just, really exhausting. Retro Diffusion's whole point from the start was making *good* pixel art, with the right style, aligned pixels, and actual thought and effort put into it to make it as good as it could be. It's feeling more and more like people don't care about that. I'm sure I'll get my normal excitement back once we're through some more of the boring maintenance work, but right now I'm just real tired and it feels like two steps backwards one step forwards. Thanks for reading my venting session 🙏

Just want to really highlight how awesome these top down styles are. You can just make whole rooms or scenes or game assets. This took me under a minute including generation time.

The pixel artists are out witch hunting again! This time against someone with an insane amount of art skill who has been in the community for years, and even made an article showing how they use AI as a reference tool. These people are insane. @thisislux is skilled as fuck.

(Thread) How I took a 1 minute sketch and turned it into a full #pixelart scene in less than 10 minutes with #RetroDiffusion Sketch, Final, NES palette, AAP128 palette. Check out the thread for instructions!

We've finally got background removal! Live on the site and API, for all your game development needs 🙏

What a time. Dropping out of art school 3 years ago and living off freelance jobs, now I'm having meetings with people I never in a million years thought would even be remotely interested what I'm doing. Feeling insanely grateful, thank you everyone whos supported this ❤️

Okay promise not to freak out but easy seamless tiles are coming to #RetroDiffusion, no image to image needed. Prompts in alt text. 👀

V2 of that new model @nerijs is baking-

Some more top down stuff :) I haven't wanted to make a game this bad in so long but I don't have time because I'm making the tools for other people to make games with 😅

Some tests from a new model :) Not final at all, but im loving the quality.

In case you guys forgot how to draw owls. #RetroDiffusion go brrr

I'm sorry to keep teasing you guys like this but I made more cool images with the unreleased model 😂

The UI is bare-bones, but check out this image editing feature! Coming soon!

Editing is going to be SO COOL! This might be my favorite feature ever, like animation is awesome but as an artist, being able to do stuff like this is WAY more interesting.

Effects are going to be SO easy

People are making such amazing things with the new VFX model! One user in the Retro Diffusion discord server is even putting together an asset pack full of vfx 🤩 You can literally just *ask* for the perfect effect animation for you game/animation/whatever.

For all the new faces checking out Retro Diffusion, not only does it have an awesome VFX animation generator and super high quality image gen, you can also generate walking sprites for basically anything human shaped!

Made in like 5 minutes. Still problems obviously, but it's pretty damn close. #RetroDiffusion + Pokemon style lora, done in the aseprite extension. "Thunder wolf" "Water snake" "Metal monkey" "Fire bear" Used the built in automatic background removal tool.

The cherry on top of all of this stupid drama is that it always boils down to "AI is stealing". Except Retro Diffusion, where all the art used was my own, or GIVEN TO ME by artists who want to help make something that helps them. Some people can never accept that though.

Oh also the walking sprites you can generate on retro diffusion also work soooo well on the new top down map style images 👀

This is absolutely insane

Y'know it's pretty frustrating looking around twitter for other pixel artists and realizing huge swaths of the space have me blocked. Pixel art, the thing I've dedicated my entire teen and adult life to. The only real job I've ever had, making pixel art and pixel art tools.

My favorite part of making art more accessible to people, BasedBanana in my discord server put together this AWESOME scene for a classic style adventure game, all with #RetroDiffusion. THIS IS AMAZING!

Working on some FLUX stuff 👀

I'm having so much fun with this style, its just so cool

New background remover for #RetroDiffusion in the works, so far it performs really well. ~2 seconds per image, capable of removing the backgrounds from pixel art AND most other kinds of images. Simple & complex backgrounds work fine, as long as the subject is well defined.

First working test of the upcoming mini model for #AsepriteDiffusion This version can go all the way down to 24x24 and still have coherent results! These are some 32x32 farm animals (and scarecrow protecting them) #pixelart #stablediffusion #aiart

IT FOLLOWED THE WHOLE PROMPT OH MY GOD CHECK THREAD

#RetroDiffusion Has even more insane stuff coming, this spritesheet model by @nerijs is just ONE of the crazy new features we are experimenting with!

Alternatively, make use of ALL the tools you have available, and learn with help from AI. Literally a personalized tutor with 24/7 office hours and basically no cost. Or keep being stubborn and watch as artists with real skill use Retro Diffusion to speed up everything they do.

We're working on adding reference images for the animations as well, and adding different kinds of animations! We also added directional seamless tiling to all image gen styles. Check it all out at retrodiffusion.ai/

Released 🙏 github.com/Astropulse/mixamo…

Another model release! RD Plus, Classic style, on the site and API. It's focused on medium-resolution pixel art with reaaalllly clean lines. Honestly this is the most "human feeling" model yet I think :)

#AsepriteDiffusion 2.0 is here! Detailed list of changes can be found on my site: astropulse.co/#asepritediffu… Get Aseprite Diffusion here: astropulse.gumroad.com/l/Ase… If you already own Aseprite Diffusion, check you inbox for the new file! #aseprite #stablediffusion #pixelart

Experiments with ControlNet. This version takes an image, extracts a pose, and uses that pose to guide #RetroDiffusion image generation. Absolutely insane, this might lead to easy animation. This is just ONE of EIGHT input options!

Raw output, first try, prompt was just "totoro" Hell yeah

Made some huge improvements to walk cycle input image mode, check these out! No prompt used, just uploaded the image and hit generate.

Okay- if I made an image generation mode similar to the video game Okami's brush strokes, would you actually use it yes or no 😅

Animations go brrrr Still early testing, but it's showing great consistency and the ability to adapt to some reasonably different subjects. No ETA on when it will be available, still extremely early testing.

Doing some more gens with the Top Down Maps style, really enjoying making these fountain scenes.

Some samples from the latest test run of the general pixel art animation model :)

Still trying out some different ways of creating animations for #RetroDiffusion, nothing solid, but this method has some promise. Going to keep testing it and see where it goes!

Trying my hand at Magnific's Lara Croft PS1 thing, no prompt, just a size selection and a few seconds. Super excited to bring this pixel art conversion tool to #RetroDiffusion soon!

More cool top down stuff

Okay I didn't think this would work but it totally did

Still working on the image quality, but the animation quality has gone up a ton. AND it can do the walking animations now as well, inside the same model.

We got idle animations on the walking bois now :)

We've been working on a new walking animation model that allows for way better image reference following, and better variations in non-human characters! Everything is still bipedal, but you can get a lot more coherent 'weird' characters, which is awesome!

Used this to make a ton of doom guy faces!

Silicon Jungle really gets how to work with generative mechanics. You can only rely on AI image gen to do so much, but even when you hit that limit you can still take things further with good old image effects.

#RetroDiffusion 9.5.0! Too many new things to cover in one post, so I'll summarize and give more details later. 8 new modifier models, game characters, isometric, and game console specific styles! Background removal! LLM prompt enhancer! 20% speed boost! Links below!

Moar

Final tests for the new #RetroDiffusion models! So excited to ship these, simultaneity going live to the Aseprite extension and the standalone models tomorrow, along with some smaller tools and fixes. Get your GPU's ready! #pixelart #landscape #aiart

Pretty sure compression will obliterate this, but here's a neat parallax background I put together this morning using #RetroDiffusion. It's so easy to just make some layers, cut out the background, and put them all together. Only took a couple hours. #pixelart #gamedev

Retro Diffusion pixel art editing is live on the site and API! Generate any <256x256 image with an RD Plus style, then you can make adjustments to it by using the "Edit Image" button in the top right. Edits take ~25 seconds, and only cost 5 credits per edit!

Coming soon to the website 😎

1/? Apparently something has caused the old Aseprite related drama to flair up, so lets recap: Aseprite publicly attacked a tool I (a very small developer, especially then) was building for THEIR platform and ecosystem, calling it theft. They asked me to change the name~

#RetroDiffusion 8.5.0! Mainly releasing for a critical install bug, but we're also adding in the AMAZING @nashor_kim style item modifier. I seriously can't thank him enough for allowing us to add it to RD. To update or purchase, check out the second post in the thread.

I made a little shadow projector for game assets, its super simple, but looks pretty good. It's going to help make some of the tileset features I'm working on for retro diffusion feel a lot more grounded :)

Okay I think this is a sick ad image but what do you guys think. Really hitting that windows 95 look.

Coming soon to a web browser near you 👀 #RetroDiffusion

Here's a demo of what you can do with the tilesets from retro diffusion, every single asset in this was generated with zero touch ups. Now imagine plugging this into a procedural generation system, where players can ask for *any* landscape or theme.

#RetroDiffusion has a website now! retrodiffusion.ai/ By creating an account you automatically get 20 free credits to try it out! For the first week all credit packs are 20% off when you use the code "CLOUDGEN" Thanks to you guys, and my amazing team for making this real!

It's here! #RetroDiffusion 8.0.0! RD now supports MacOS, Linux, and AMD GPUs (on Linux)! Generate awesome #pixelart on any powerful enough hardware, check out the product page in the second post for more details!

It's wooorrrkkiinnggg! Got some testing to do, and no idea what the price/credit will be, but a #RetroDiffusion website is coming! Soon everyone can get cool AI pixels without needing an RTX over-9000 80GB GPU. (RD can actually run on 4gb nvidia cards, but you get the point)

Thank you to the haters for sharing my work and pushing me from 1.7k to 1.8k followers today ❤️ Wouldn’t be here without them 🥺 I hope eventually you can see I’m helping artists, and have been from the start.

This is so cool!!!

Another late night working on #RetroDiffusion I was playing around with the idea of "prompt upsampling" from the Dalle-3 paper. Leads to some awesome results ngl. Way better at understanding short prompts and making relevant images. Nailed the vibe I had in mind every time.

The models are literally trained on my work.

Steam finally released an official statement on AI generation in games on the platform, AND ITS A HUGE WIN FOR AI! 🎉🎉🎉 Basically boils down to being treated the same way all other images are, and live generated content is expected to adhere to the same standard Link below ⬇️

How I imagine the player character in #noita looks when he uses a wand with death cross. #pixelart #gaming #sorcerer

Now you can fight stuff this is awesome 👀

GUYS WE'RE ON POE NOW!

Ha Hahaha Yep, artists are still bitching about AI, even though there has been virtually no effect on the industry, and it’s their own pricing and poor marketing keeping them from succeeding.

This past week has been incredible. I never though my extension would get this much attention. I was able to pay off my student loans today because of your support. I can't even begin to say how much that means to me. Thank you all so very very much <3

After the news today about OpenAI’s board removing CEO Sam Altman, the Retro Diffusion board (me) met to discuss removing the current CEO (also me). We are excited to announce that all of the shareholders (me again) agree that I should step down, and be replaced by me.

Working on a one click photo -> pixel art pipeline for #RetroDiffusion. Not perfect, but damn its close. CLIP interrogation, ControlNet, img2img, and image processing all wrapped into one. #pixelart #stablediffusion

Also I know I've teased animation a bunch of times but this time it actually looks promising 🤩

🫡