Alright, so this is an attempt to make a fair and balanced review. Instead of telling you whether or not you should get it, I'll give you my first takes on this software as raw data and let you decide for yourself, cheers.
Pros
Firstly, I can attest that this software does indeed work. (Included below, it's not a great chest but it's what I got on my first try.) And I've included a cute little image of a chest that I made to test it out.
Specialized with Aesprite which means that you can immediately get to working on the sprite as soon as it rolls in.
Creates sprite art in a more niche market for game developers in a popular sprite-making software.
Has cute little beep noises to let you know which parts of the process you're on and when it's done.
Has differentiated models for portraits, objects, architecture, etc.
The tiling feature does work. (Example shown below.) Sadly it seems fairly limited and does stone and grass textures more than things like wall textures and floorboards, etc.
Cons
The price. At the time of writing it's a whopping $65. This is fairly shocking as there's already other models out there that can handle sprite art very well without a lot of the downsides that this one has.
It has you install Python and Git, which for some can be pretty scary and some more paranoid folks would want to know that coming in for fear of computer hijackings, data theft and the like. If I suddenly go quiet or start acting funny on here, or this account becomes a glaringly good review, you know what happened. :)
I couldn't actually get this thing to make a character portrait... I tried a few times and in a few different ways and it just never created one. I got some cute full-body sprite art, but not portraits. Also I noticed that while the AI is very cute and does the style well, it has trouble creating what you're describing and tends to default to something close but not quite. (Example of the little fox-monk I tried to get as a portrait but instead got full-body sprite of art included below.)
Speed and CPU use may be problematic for some. My PC actually started to overheat a little and the only other time I've had that happen was running a game of UEBS 2 with a truly disgusting number of troops deployed. I can't for the life of me figure out why this would cause my CPU to overheat like that where cutting edge games don't. But I'm not exactly an AI expert.
With tiling, there are two options that do different things. The "Tile X direction" and "Tile Y direction" can be made visible by toggling "Show advanced options", these settings mathematically force the image to tile. This can be great when you need something to tile that normally wouldn't, but its also very heavy handed and can make weird stuff. The second option is to enable the "Tiling" modifier. This is a specialized image generator that has been trained on tiling textures, stuff like Minecraft blocks. It works best at 16x16 or 32x32.
For portraits, typically putting something like "A close up portrait of ___" or "A headshot of ___" will do the trick. For example here is "A close up portrait of a fox monk" with all other settings at default values:
On speed and CPU usage:
AI image creation is actually one of the most complex tasks computers can do, when you boil it down, its essentially solving differential equations with billions of inputs and outputs. Way more demanding than any AAA game, or even most 3D rendering software, even for small pixel art images. This is why the compatibility section is so strict.
We've managed to get the requirements down to a 4GB GPU, which is pretty impressive given the size of the models and the complexity of the computations. You can find system requirements and some benchmark data above on the main page.
Again thanks for the review, and I hope it helps people with the decision to buy or not!
Thanks for the feedback, some very useful info. And it's a fascinating thing on the CPU usage, it makes a lot of sense given the nature of AI. Keep up the great work. :)
!!! BEFORE PURCHASING ENSURE YOU READ THE COMPATIBILITY SECTION BELOW, THIS VERSION DOES NOT CONTAIN STANDALONE MODEL FILES !!!
The compatibility section does not appear to discuss the model files best I can tell. If the model files can't be hosted on itch.io, how does one get them in order to run this 100% locally? Are they automatically downloaded upon the first generation run?
The model files required by the extension are downloaded automatically, but these files are only usable inside of Aseprite. If you need model files for use outside of Aseprite you can either purchase the extension through Gumroad, or contact me with proof of purchase and I'll send a redeemable code.
if i may suggest something, please make it so unless setting such as prompts, size and reference image are changed, it does not consume even more credits, cause i tried and i basically spended all of my credits and didnt got anything close to what i thought, and i cant reroll or tweak some simple values to try again.
Every time an image is generated it cost us on the server-side, even if no settings were changed, so we can't make that an option unfortunately. Sorry you didn't get what you were expecting. What were you trying to create?
Hi, this looks really cool. Seeing the storage on the hardware requirement, I assume the paid version is local. I have a few questions :
- Is there things that can only be done on the paid Aseprite version and not on the web version ?
- It seems the paid version gives you a license key that you can use to redeem tokens for the web version, right ? How many tokens ?
- 16GB RAM is recommended or a minimum ?
- I assume there's no refund policy, just in case...
- In your performance stats, what is the image size between "512x512" and "64x64 pixel model" ? (ex: Intel i5-8300H: 20 steps 512x512 (64x64 pixel model) in 10 minutes.)
- Does the paid Aseprite version has an "input image" feature like the web version ?
The thing is I have an intel-5 CPU, an integrated intel iris Xe GPU and 8GB RAM so I'm not sure I'd be able to run it locally. But I'd prefer to have a one time payment rather than constantly buying credits for the web version.
Hey! The paid version does run locally. The goal is for the web and local versions to maintain as many identical features as possible, right now the web is slightly behind but we're updating it this week.
There aren't any tokens with the local version.
16GB RAM is a minimum for CPU only generations. If you have a capable GPU you only need 8GB of RAM.
There isn't an explicit refund policy, but we provide refunds to anyone who asks.
The pixel art image size for a 512x512 generation is 64x64. Both the extension and the web version handle all the size conversions behind the scenes for you.
All versions have an image input option.
Based on the hardware you mentioned, you would not be able to run it. Intel iris Xe is not a dedicated gpu, but rather integrated graphics on your cpu. You must have a dedicated GPU with at least 4GB of VRAM. You can refer to this system requirements chart for more detailed compatibility requirements:
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Alright, so this is an attempt to make a fair and balanced review. Instead of telling you whether or not you should get it, I'll give you my first takes on this software as raw data and let you decide for yourself, cheers.
Pros
Cons
Hey! Thanks for the review!
Here's some tips for tiling and portraits:
With tiling, there are two options that do different things. The "Tile X direction" and "Tile Y direction" can be made visible by toggling "Show advanced options", these settings mathematically force the image to tile. This can be great when you need something to tile that normally wouldn't, but its also very heavy handed and can make weird stuff.
The second option is to enable the "Tiling" modifier. This is a specialized image generator that has been trained on tiling textures, stuff like Minecraft blocks. It works best at 16x16 or 32x32.
For portraits, typically putting something like "A close up portrait of ___" or "A headshot of ___" will do the trick. For example here is "A close up portrait of a fox monk" with all other settings at default values:
![]()
On speed and CPU usage:
AI image creation is actually one of the most complex tasks computers can do, when you boil it down, its essentially solving differential equations with billions of inputs and outputs. Way more demanding than any AAA game, or even most 3D rendering software, even for small pixel art images. This is why the compatibility section is so strict.
We've managed to get the requirements down to a 4GB GPU, which is pretty impressive given the size of the models and the complexity of the computations. You can find system requirements and some benchmark data above on the main page.
Again thanks for the review, and I hope it helps people with the decision to buy or not!
Thanks for the feedback, some very useful info. And it's a fascinating thing on the CPU usage, it makes a lot of sense given the nature of AI. Keep up the great work. :)
Hi! This looks really cool. Can it do isometric assets?
Yep! There is an isometric model in the "Modifier" section :)
https://imgur.com/a/t17Azsa
Good to know. Is there a way to use a custom color palette? Without that, it'd be kind of hard to get a consistent style
Oh wait it says there is on the page, my bad. I just didn't see one in the web demo
Hi, I'd love to get a look at this tool, but being Brazilian is hard haha. Any chance you'll have an Easter sale?
There is a sale going on right now!
Sweet, just got it! Is there any way I could get the files for the standalone models as well?
Send me a message on Discord with proof of purchase and I'll send you a code to get the model files :)
thank you! Will do
Hi, what exactly do you mean by:
!!! BEFORE PURCHASING ENSURE YOU READ THE COMPATIBILITY SECTION BELOW, THIS VERSION DOES NOT CONTAIN STANDALONE MODEL FILES !!!
The compatibility section does not appear to discuss the model files best I can tell. If the model files can't be hosted on itch.io, how does one get them in order to run this 100% locally? Are they automatically downloaded upon the first generation run?
The model files required by the extension are downloaded automatically, but these files are only usable inside of Aseprite. If you need model files for use outside of Aseprite you can either purchase the extension through Gumroad, or contact me with proof of purchase and I'll send a redeemable code.
Is AMD GPU support for windows completely discarded or are you looking into it in the future?
What are the datasets you trained this model on, do you own the copyrights or have permission, if not, why are you selling it ?
All of the training data we use is given to us by artists for the purpose of training, a plurality of the dataset is even my own artwork.
They dont have permission
You can literally read my post above, stating that I had permission for each image we used in training.
Hi, I have 16gb ram. I'm using RTX 3050ti 4gb vram. Is 4gb vram enough for model? How much steps can I go with 4gb vram?
4gb is on the low end, but you will be able to make 64x64 images.
not gonna buy cause it would break me, but it looks very well trained congrats
Thank you! You should check out the site, its a bit more affordable and you can even try it for free :) https://www.retrodiffusion.ai
if i may suggest something, please make it so unless setting such as prompts, size and reference image are changed, it does not consume even more credits, cause i tried and i basically spended all of my credits and didnt got anything close to what i thought, and i cant reroll or tweak some simple values to try again.
Every time an image is generated it cost us on the server-side, even if no settings were changed, so we can't make that an option unfortunately. Sorry you didn't get what you were expecting. What were you trying to create?
Hi, this looks really cool. Seeing the storage on the hardware requirement, I assume the paid version is local. I have a few questions :
- Is there things that can only be done on the paid Aseprite version and not on the web version ?
- It seems the paid version gives you a license key that you can use to redeem tokens for the web version, right ? How many tokens ?
- 16GB RAM is recommended or a minimum ?
- I assume there's no refund policy, just in case...
- In your performance stats, what is the image size between "512x512" and "64x64 pixel model" ? (ex: Intel i5-8300H: 20 steps 512x512 (64x64 pixel model) in 10 minutes.)
- Does the paid Aseprite version has an "input image" feature like the web version ?
The thing is I have an intel-5 CPU, an integrated intel iris Xe GPU and 8GB RAM so I'm not sure I'd be able to run it locally. But I'd prefer to have a one time payment rather than constantly buying credits for the web version.
Hey! The paid version does run locally. The goal is for the web and local versions to maintain as many identical features as possible, right now the web is slightly behind but we're updating it this week.
There aren't any tokens with the local version.
16GB RAM is a minimum for CPU only generations. If you have a capable GPU you only need 8GB of RAM.
There isn't an explicit refund policy, but we provide refunds to anyone who asks.
The pixel art image size for a 512x512 generation is 64x64. Both the extension and the web version handle all the size conversions behind the scenes for you.
All versions have an image input option.
Based on the hardware you mentioned, you would not be able to run it. Intel iris Xe is not a dedicated gpu, but rather integrated graphics on your cpu. You must have a dedicated GPU with at least 4GB of VRAM. You can refer to this system requirements chart for more detailed compatibility requirements:
thank you for the answers