I’m playing with a fun new AI tool called “human generator” – it lets you get really detailed in your options, and it feels like creating a character profile in a video game. I was impressed by the realistic quality of the clothing… usually people use Daz3D to make fantasy or scifi characters because there are no great stock photos of people wearing cool fantasy or scifi gear.
But Daz3D people look like plastic dolls and need a headswap. They’ve been the best option for years, but things are changing fast… for example I’ve been using midjourney AI for book cover design, or at least character concepts, and it’s amazing – but prompting to get exactly what you want is tricky.
This tool gives you more control, so it could be really useful for making cool character portraits or stock you can use in your book covers, or for anything really. Stock photography has always been limiting, because it’s never unique so even a great design can be spoiled if someone else uses the same assets.
With AI art you get something unique. This tool doesn’t seem ideal for fantasy/scifi – the lighting is too natural daylight instead of moody and dark – but it could be really good for random regular people pictures or some kind of fashion project.
Try it now: Generate a human here!
I only played with it for a while, but here’s some interesting stuff:
- the backgrounds are too plain and modern (good for contemporary maybe but not artistic enough for a strong book cover)
- Consistency is really good, with the same prompts you get the same images… so for example these two, are wearing similar clothing even though I changed the pose and setting. It had trouble with the pose on the left, but the top/face is really good.
- Bottom left, that’s a whole character concept with leather gloves, boots etc – I’ve tried making something for years in Daz, and a ton with midjourney, but it pretty much nailed the style; I could strip the background, do a headswap and use that character…
- It seems to do risque stuff a little better than midjourney, choosing miniskirt and showing more leg for example, which is pretty common in urban fantasy. I have a lot of images like bottom right, but they look a little messy and unclear (midjourney4 did better with art but not details, midjourney 5 is realistic but not pretty).
- The poses are pretty limited, and I’d like to see more closeup headshots with different angles or expressions.
Stock photos for book covert art
Here’s a big list of stock photo sites to get assets to use to build your cover. You always need to make sure you have the right permissions. With AI art, right now there aren’t commercial limitations (depending on the tool, with midjourney you need to pay for pro) so you probably won’t get into trouble using it, other than the potential controversy from the anti-AI crowd.
There are some sites to get stock Daz3D renders as well, which are super useful. You’ll probably need to do a headswap anyway, so you’ll need pics for the background, the character/clothing, and then the face – and then blending things altogether to get natural lighting is the hard part and what designers will do in photoshop.
Midjourney makes that easier, because it gives you 1 good piece of art and the lighting and shadows are consistent. I’d say my midjourney art is *better* than the human generator, especially for fantasy and scifi… but I did get some very unique and nice looking dark academia, gothic fashion I could see using in a design. You can see my fantasy art on this post with my best midjourney prompts.
I’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write fantasy novels to pay for my cake addiction. Sometimes I live in castles.
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