Another day, another art competition for limited-edition crypto-goodies :)

Augmentors has just launched a competition to design a custom skin for one of their characters.
The 3 winners of the competition, decided based on a selection by Augmentors and a popular vote, gets their skin in-game as well as 150 DTBs (I assume it's their game-currency... I honestly don't know much about Augmentors XP )

Here is the end result of me playing around with GIMP, the character templates, and some Deep Dreaming to compensate for enhance my talent in the arts.

And lots more. There's a BIG list of the images towards the very bottom !

Now, some context and the details of my process:

I need a breaaaaak

My brain needed a break from work, and something artsy to do, and since Vectary has decided now was a good time to launch the new version with a rendering system, and completely different controls (Which I do not have the brain power to try to comprehend right now), I had to make do with the first interesting things I found... which happened to be an email from Augmentors about this competition !

The competition is made for designing a few new skins for the main characters, and they graciously provide templates to base one's work off of:

Above templates are the property of Augmentors, and all rights are theirs

Lazy attempt: Just Deep Dream

My first, very lazy, attempt was to just pass the template through Deep Dream to see what happened.

Pretty much nothing, really.

After all, there has to BE a pattern for that pattern to be corrupted, and right now the image is just a slight trace of a drawing with white everywhere else.

There were a few stranger results too:

Cyborg version ?

Is it generating blue shadows for the character ? what the heck...

But all together it looked like I needed to get my hands at least a bit dirty.

GIMPing that character

So, I decided to import the character into GIMP, the GNU image manipulation software, to:

• harden the lines

• apply a bit of random color here and there, so that Deep Dream had something to work off.

Here's how that worked:

1. import into GIMP

1. Use Bucket tool on the grayish lines to strengthen them (I did this by accident... and was quite surprised by well it worked XD )

1. use the bucket tool to color the different sections in different colors, to give Deep Dream something to eat ;)

I did this for the Sha Win, Markik and Tiska Win characters:

Deep Dream experimentation Ahoy !

Then, I just went over to Deep Dream Generator and uploaded the designs, testing them against the Deep Dream, Simple Style, and Deep Style algorithms.

To see all the variations I tried, check out my Deep Dream Generator Profile

But here are my favorites:

Horrors unseen XO

Fiery demise

Path of Veins

She's Watching

A fiery glow

Birds...

...of a feather...

...flock together

I'll be making my submission on the official Augmentors discord with what I consider the best versions of the 3 characters I applied this process to, as entries into the competition, linking back to this post so that Augmentors can see all the entries :)

Here's the one's I've selected:

Sha Win

Markik

Tiska Win

---

I initially thought about removing the background entirely as I did in second image at the very beginning of this post, but that involves a very time-consuming process of bucket-filling a mask layer in GIMP with white for every single different color on the outside of the characters...

That, or literally bringing an eraser around everything, which is even more time consuming XS

---

Copyright of all images, including derivatives created using Deep Dream, belong to Augmentors, given it's their characters everything was based off.