Monday, May 4, 2026

Transforming Wargame Pictures into Drawings

Nearly done my Space Hulk project ... on the final push to finish that up. 

That being said - due to some other work I have been doing around some scenarios, I've been messing around lately with taking real pictures from my wargames and making them into drawings/art using AI.  While AI is dumb in many ways and sucks at many things, it is fairly good at doing this. All of the images below are from pictures taken using my DSLR camera with a zoom lens during my many ACW wargames.  Some minor editing and cleanup is needed after AI does the bulk of the work.

Sharing here for reference and to show how evolving technologies can benefit us in the wargame community.

Another use this past weekend was during a game session with my good friend Roy Scaife.  He was hosting a game of Maladum (dungeon crawler board game).  He wants to get the miniatures for the game painted but there are no good painting references.  I took a few pictures of the miniatures using my phone and had AI generate painting references for them.  It worked great for that.

Anywho ... on to the pictures ...





























Some of the best wargame pictures I have are from my ACW games, but I have many other pictures and decided to throw some of those at it to see  what it would do.  I didn't spend as much post-processing time on these as I was just messing around.



AI does some wonky stuff.  In this image above it had inserted a monkey (rather subtly I might add - took me a minute to spot it) into the scene near the artillery ... why?  Just AI doing random stuff.  Had to remove it.





I really like what it did with my epic Pike & Shotte picture here.  I need to mess around more with the pictures of my epic Pike & Shotte and Hail Caesar stuff.





Many interesting possibilities here.  Especially when it comes to designing scenarios and writing up rules references.  I must emphasize that everything needs detailed reviewing and corrections are almost always necessary.

8 comments:

  1. They look great Jay, very interesting.

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  2. It looks clever stuff and the results are very nice. Some of them stylewise remind me of the kinds of pictures I liked in the 60s and 70s or books from that time. It seems that tidying up the results might take quite a bit of time when doing a number of pictures.
    The gaining a painting list from a photo seems a useful tool.
    However so far I have not ventured into the world of AI tools except what others have done.
    Thanks for sharing - not least the miniatures behind the pictures.
    Stephen

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Stephen. I have no artistic skill and always loved drawibgs like this. I think the key thing is tge best results still require setting the scene with real models and terrain. Just another way to bring our collections to life.

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  3. Fantastic! I really like these.

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