(Pocket-lint) – The clever bods over at Nvidia are always coming up with new ways to use artificial intelligence to do weird and wonderful things. That includes crafting new tools to help creators up their game and enhance their workflow. But it also sometimes means free bits of software we can all turn our hand to.
Nvidia Canvas is one such product. This free app uses AI to turn your digital brushstrokes into lifelike images in real-time. That’s right, with Nvidia’s help you can turn your rough sketches and doodles into a work of art.
The Canvas app is available to anyone, with one caveat – you need to be running an Nvidia RTX graphics card in order for it to work. As long as that’s the case you can simply load up the app then start painting.
Nvidia says it has used generative adversarial networks to train this system by using over 5 million images allowing Canvas to create spectacular, realistic end results.
The painting process is fairly straightforward too. On the right-hand side, there’s a tool grid that allows you to choose from a number of different “materials” to paint with. That list includes sky, clouds, grass, hills, stone, sea, sand, rivers, fog and more. Select one of those and paint a blob and you’ll see a corresponding realistic image appear on the second panel.
There’s also an option to change between different styles which are like filters for your final image.
With just a few strokes you can create all kinds of different images that could easily have been taken in the real world. If you’re particularly impressed with the results you can export it as .psd file and import it into Adobe Photoshop to add some finishing touches.
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What are you waiting for? Download Canvas and get painting now. We’ve created some examples for you to enjoy.
A cloudy sandscape
We crafted this image using the Canvas app and simple swipes of the brush. A few with the cloud tool, another on the left for the hillside, then a wash of sand in the distant bottom.
The result is a fairly appealing sunset vista. And a convincing one too.
Shingle shores
For this image, we just used two tools, one to paint some gravel in the foreground, the other to paint the sea lapping away happily in the distance. The result is surprisingly convincing.
A desolate landscape
Here we were trying to create a rough landscape with just a single puddle, a lonely tree and a reasonably cloudy day. It’s not entirely convincing we’ll admit, as the sun looks particularly crazy.
Red sky at night
Using the AI, it’s easy to create more curious and artistic visions of the world. Here, with a few brush strokes, we managed to create an ominous mountain with a red sunset highlighting its peak.
Marshland
We’re really impressed by the views you can create with the Canvas app. It’s wonderfully easy to craft convincing landscapes. Here we’ve managed to create an interesting marshland view on a cloudy but sunny day.
Styles
This image is the same painting as our marshland one, but with a style applied. There’s a simple button in the app that lets you simply press a button to change the style and completely overhaul your image.
Fields of gold
The tools within the app let you add all sorts of things from straw to snow, gravel, sand, stone, flowers, water, mud and more.
We used the straw tool to create a field of wheat.
Snowy bootprints
We tried to create something a bit more arty with this one. A reasonably sunny looking area of ​​grass now has some snowy bootprints passing through it. Somehow unmelted and unmolested by the warmth of the sun.
A snowy day
A simple snowy view we created as a peaceful and serene locale. There’s a chill in the air, no doubt, but a pleasant peace in this entirely fake landscape.
A snowy view at night
Once again, we kept one image we’d created and simply applied a different style to it. Suddenly the wonderfully peaceful snowy region is backdropped by the wonder of our universe stretching off into the night’s sky.
Grains of sand
The power of the AI ​​here is good enough to create close-up views of grains of sand on a made-up beach. There are some blurry parts at the edges, but it could easily have been taken with a shaky hand and a smartphone or a bokeh styling.
Writing by Adrian Willings.
