A surprisingly interesting project has appeared online that combines our favourite LEGO theme with the hottest topic right now in IT and beyond, namely artificial intelligence. The results are interesting, to say the least!
I admit I didn’t see this coming 😉 Even though I work with AI professionally, it never occurred to me that someone might create a model that can generate BrickHeadz figures. It’s a pleasant surprise, the results are very interesting and there’s certainly a lot of potential in it.
On 14 August a certain Brandon G. Neri published an announcement about a ready-made model, which we can find on Hugging Face and civitai.com.
https://twitter.com/nerijs/status/1690956882238672896
The easiest way to test the model is on the Hugging Face page I mentioned, where on the right there’s a box in which we can enter a description of the figure, press the “Compute” button and wait for the results. I encourage you to experiment!
Out of curiosity I also tested what is probably the most popular image generation service, Midjourney. Below I show a comparison of the model described above (on the left) and Midjourney (on the right), along with the prompts I used. I should point out that I’m no prompt expert and it can certainly be done better. Online you can find a few paid offers of prompts dedicated to LEGO bricks for Midjourney.
Prompt: picture of a LEGO brickheadz of green santa claus, high resolution, HD, realistic, LEGO style
I have to admit that the model dedicated to BrickHeadz does much better, but it’s still not perfect. And to be honest, I had to make several attempts at generating an image on Hugging Face to get a satisfactory result. Either way, we have to accept that AI is entering every aspect of our lives. Personally, it makes me more glad than worried.
Update 2023-10-23
I came across another model that can generate BrickHeadz figures, you’ll find it here. I think the results are comparable to the model described above, and I wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t for one specific piece of information in its description. Namely, only 900 images were used to train the model! And they weren’t only images of BrickHeadz figures, because this model can also generate minifigures and buildings in the LEGO Creator style. So we need only a few hundred images to generate pretty good quality images in a specific style. Amazing!