Ever looked at your works of MS Paint art and thought "I wish this looked a bit more like a professional photograph"?
Well, now you can, as long as you have NVIDIA's Canvas app and an RTX GPU.
Make Art Great Again With NVIDIA Canvas
OK, so perhaps your awful MS Paint jobs aren't worthy of any digital artwork of the year awards, but you can get them as near as damn it with NVIDIA Canvas.
How so? Well, NVIDIA has just released the Canvas app as a public beta, meaning that you can try it out for yourself.
According to an NVIDIA blog post, you can turn a collection of simple colored globules into stunning landscapes using the new app.
What Is NVIDIA Canvas, and How Does It Work?
NVIDIA Canvas is an app that forms part of the powerful NVIDIA Studio suite. It makes use of the brand's real-time painting tool—GauGAN—to let:
... creators paint by material rather than color, using AI to turn brushstrokes into lifelike images... by using deep learning models to turn rough sketches into stunning scenes.
As said, it works in real time. So, as you drop blobs of color into the artwork space on Canvas, a second screen displays your art in all of its fully rendered glory.
NVIDIA says:
Users start by sketching simple shapes and lines with a palette of real-world materials, like grass or clouds. The AI model then immediately fills the screen with show-stopping results. Four quick shapes and a stunning mountain range appears. A few more lines produce a beautiful field.
So, rather than painting landscapes pixel by pixel, you select the type of scenery you want to paint, throw a few brush strokes onto the art board, and Canvas will generate a lifelike work of photorealistic art right beside it.
You can even swap materials, so if you have an ocean scene with crashing waves and rocky outcrops, a quick flick of a switch will turn it into grassy, rolling hills with copses of trees. All with the power of AI.
How Do You Get the NVIDIA Canvas App?
Getting the app is easy. Just head over to the NVIDIA Canvas page and download the beta.
Using it might not be so simple. You'll need a Windows machine (sorry Mac users) running Windows 10, with one of the following GPUs:
- GeForce RTX
- NVIDIA RTX
- Quadro RTX
- TITAN RTX
If you do go ahead and download the beta, then make sure you do your bit and let NVIDIA know what you think, or if you find any bugs, over on the NVIDIA forums.
Get Painting, John Constable!
OK, so Constable didn't produce photographic images, but he did produce some of the finest landscapes in artistic history. At least with NVIDIA Canvas your terrible artwork can now look somewhat passable.