The Delphi Digital Fan Art and AI Art Contest is coming to a close soon, but we have seen some truly amazing entries celebrating the creativity of humans and machines! All sorts of art styles have been created using a variety of techniques. We’ve also seen how to use Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth via APIs from Delphi clients. We’ve also seen how ChatGPT can be used to create art. Let’s take a closer look at this fun contest.
The contest is open to anyone around the world who wanted to explore their creativity with digital art. Participants can either submit their own fan art or create AI-generated art (and even do so from within a Delphi client). Winners will be selected by Embarcadero.
Many submissions have been received, showing off both traditional fan art and AI-generated artwork in all sorts of mediums. We saw many fun pieces featuring Spartan helmets and fire monkeys! It is fun to see how much talent is showcased during this competition.
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Generating Vector Art Using AI
Illustroke is a service that offers API access to a text to vector AI art generation model. You can ask it for “Roman general with a plume helmet” for example and you receive a nice black and white SVG containing exactly that.
Vector art is an incredibly powerful tool because it is composed of mathematical equations that create images from vector points, lines and curves. These vector lines and points can be easily modified, scaled and edited so they look just as good on a billboard as they do on a business card. Bitmap based art, however, uses pixel-by-pixel painting which makes scaling or editing their canvas difficult. Furthermore, bitmap-based art is usually resolution dependent which means the quality of the image deteriorates when its size changes. In comparison vector-based artwork keeps its vector structure regardless of how much you resize it. Ultimately vector artwork offers flexibility, scalability and accurate replication that has been a designer’s go-to option since its earliest iterations in the late 90s.
Here is what the SVG format of the above image looks like:
[crayon-673f49354add6516960605/]
The Skia4Delphi project makes it easy to use SVGs within Delphi projects (you can literally cut and paste SVGs into Delphi).
Skia4Delphi is an open-source library that offers Delphi developers access to a powerful drawing framework. It enables software developers using the Delphi language to write applications that are visually rich, interactive and realize modern user interfaces. Skia4Delphi does this by providing efficient hardware accelerated drawing API and libraries based on Google’s Skia graphics library. With its versatile feature set, Skia4Delphi helps developers create stunning user interfaces to give their applications a professional look. Skia4Delphi leverages the strength of the skia library to deliver strong performance even in mobile devices with lower memory and graphics power, making application development platform-independent without compromising on looks or performance.
How can I access the Illustroke text to vector API in Delphi?
Illustroke provides a simple enough API for text to vector image generation. You head over to their website to get an API key and then you can execute a REST call with some text. It will return a vector file that the AI model generates from your text.
There is an open source Delphi client that gives you access to the Illustroke API without writing any code. The client is designed for the desktop but should work on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux with a single codebase and UI. The Delphi REST Debugger was used to generate the components used in the client. You can see a screenshot of the app below.
Head over and download the full source code to the Text To Vector desktop client.
Delphi’s REST Debugger is a powerful tool that grants developers the ability to quickly and accurately debug rest related applications and requests. With the REST Debugger, developers can get a thorough overview of REST requests, response codes, and any errors that may be encountered along the way. It makes integration into REST based applications simple and straightforward. The REST Debugger in Delphi streamlines such debugging processes from start to finish, minimizing time spent on debugging so you can maximize your development time. It also has a “Copy Components” button which allows you to copy the configuration of the REST controls from the Debugger and paste them directly into Delphi where they can be used in your real application.
Delphi Fan Art Contest Highlights
Now let’s take a look at the most recent contest entries:
Ready to get started?
It is wonderful to see so many people come together for this competition and celebrate creativity through digital art! Congratulations to all participants for their submissions – it was such an honor being able to observe your creative minds at work! For those interested in getting into digital artwork themselves, why not check out some tutorials online? You never know what kind of masterpiece you can create with just a few clicks!
Find out more about the Delphi fan art contest!