Let's continue the character collages and discussion on what I picked and why. I'm still in the basic Castle heroes, after all, and I have more than half a dozen still to get through the first faction. And honestly, what I've done with Castle is probably the least interesting of the factions. Sanya has a really boring bio and a really terrible specialty; Eagle Eye, which is usually a skill that most players aren't interested in. Visually, she's got a stern face; a kind of Medieval fantasy Karen, maybe, although that's not exactly unexpected or out of place for the faction and class.
Let's have a look at the options. I've got a little bit more to talk about with Sanya than normal.
Let's ignore, like usual, the ones that are a different art style (dtnmang and Vallex) and those that are just some other girl, cribbed from some other art source (Pack 01, Pack 02 and StrikerX.) Again; we're down to the AI generated ones. As usual, ensrick's is the best, because he didn't just slap it in img2img, but actually spent a lot of time and effort in Photoshop to make sure his AI generated alternative had some artistic merit. Although, his girl staring into space rather than looking at the player, and being prettier, softer and younger rather than more severe and impatient looking, really gives her a different feel. It's like a different girl—a much younger, teenaged girl—cosplaying a more mature hero that she idolizes or something.
The last option I had was ensrick's take on Gwenneth. She is actually a character from earlier HOMM games that was brought back by the Tides of War expansion for VCMI and WoG, but the fact that she has almost all of the same traits as Sanya—red hair, brown hood, forehead diadem, Castle background, mature stern visage—makes her a very credible alternative.
Ultimately I didn't decide to use her, though. Because many of the Castle heroes, and the girl Clerics in particular, don't really stand out to me anyway, I'd probably have trouble recognizing them if I don't hew as closely as possible to the original, including the pose and angle that you see them at. As I get more into this and have played more, I may yet decide to be a little bolder and use her portrait instead, but for now—and probably forever, because like I said, I really don't care that much about most of the cleric heroes anyway—I'm going with ensrick's original.
WINNER: ensrick's original, once again. I'm sure I've said it before, but I'll say it again, unless the Original is really bad and needs a new concept, or ensrick himself explored a new concept and I didn't like the direction he's going, he's always a contender and usually the winner.
As an aside, that's a testament to the idea that AI art isn't as simple as pushing a button. The two Stable Diffusion collections are no doubt simple img2img conversions, and they sometimes come out OK, but there are usually strange artifacts to them, or they just came out looking funky, or something didn't quite work. Occasionally by luck they end up being a good choice, but it's a great example that an artist who uses AI but who has developed some skill at getting good results out of AI, and uses his own digital art experience and ability to improve and modify the results will always be significantly better than someone who just slaps a prompt together and has no such skill. AI assisted art is still art. The fact that ensrick is consistently better than the alternatives proves that beyond any doubt.
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