Nvidia Canvas Uses AI To Turn Doodles Into Photorealistic Photos

Nvidia Canvas

It's probably safe to say that anyone can sketch. It's also safe to say that not a lot of people can really draw.

Nvidia tries to bridge the gap with what it calls the 'Canvas'. What it does, is using AI to bring real-time painting tool, so anyone can turn doodles into photorealistic scenes. All it takes is just some rudimentary sketches, and leave the AI do the rest.

Users can start sketching simple shapes and lines using Canvas' 15 different elements and 9 environmental styles, to then create things like mountains, clouds, grass, or weather effects. The AI will turn those into a photorealistic scene with jaw-dropping quality, all in real-time.

Canvas is part of Nvidia Studio, which is a program that provides artists and creators with both hardware and software tools to assist in bringing their creativity to life.

Initially launched as beta, Canvas is the consumer-facing version of the app that Nvidia showcased back in 2019.

But this product here, is far more advanced than what was teased back then.

To make this happen, Canvas uses an AI that works with the tools palate. Then, Canvas works by understanding what users are trying to show.

Nvidia created Canvas by using GANs (generative adversarial networks), which pitted two agents against each other.

The first agent is the generator, which is programmed to covert material maps into images. The second agent is the discriminator, which is designed to understand certain aspects of what is generated.

Nvidia has used this kind of approach on its previous AI algorithms, including the tool to create photorealistic faces.

“To deliver realistic portraits for artists, the GAN has been trained on an NVIDIA DGX system using over 5 million images,” NVIDIA says.

According to Nvidia, the creative applications of the tool are “endless,” and that it can help artists create things a lot faster, considering that the task is normally far more time-consuming to finish.

And the result is indeed impressive.

Nvidia Studio, Canvas
Credit: Nvidia

“It can also bring time savings to a range of creators and designers,” NVIDIA explains.

“Consider an art director on a time crunch who needs to refine the hero product in an ad campaign. A landscape will complete the shot. Using NVIDIA Canvas, the director is only a few clicks from generating several beautifully rendered images. In a matter of moments, the tool provides multiple options for the client to review, saving precious time before finalizing the featured product.”

And if that is not enough, users can export the final creation to Adobe Photoshop for further editing.

For convenience, Canvas retains separate layers to help with efficiency and ease of use for the creator.

This app delivers what its AI is capable of. In the modern world of tech, researchers have shown increasingly capable AIs, and this Canvas app showcases exactly that.

Nvidia has made Canvas free for anyone to use.

The requirements include a Windows 10 operating system with either GeForce RTX, NVIDIA RTX, Quadro RTX or TITAN RTX, and a driver version 460.89 or later.

Published: 
26/06/2021