Layer comes with multiple pre-trained styles that you can use to create art assets. These styles were created to show the possibilities with Layer using our own assets used for training purposes.

Think of styles as aesthetic art styles, such as pixel art, anime, digital painting, cartoon, etc. Layer is able to support any art style as long as it is provided with sufficient training data. You can train your own if you are on Pro and above plans.

No. Your input defines your output. Therefore, if you like to create assets that are more realistic, you will need to train Layer with such assets to create your ‘realistic’ art style. The same rule applies to any style you would like to create on Layer.

All of our paid plans except Free allows you to create custom styles.

If your project has a distinct art style, the default pre-trained styles might not match the aesthetic your assets need. This is when you’ll need to create a custom style (also known as training a style).

It’s encouraged that you will likely have multiple custom styles per game project. To get the most accurate generations, you should train a separate style for each part of your game, as well as a general style that you can utilize to experiment with new concepts.

So for example, let’s say you have an RPG game that looks like this:

You might have styles for the following:

You can see from here that more general, broader styles are better for concepting and exploration, while more specific custom styles are better for production assets that have to be more specific.

The first step in creating a custom style is to gather 6-25 source images.

These source images will be the basis of how Layer creates a custom model to fit your style, so it’s important to select the right ones for best results.

Captioning your source images is just as important, if not more important than the images themselves. When captioning an image you want to be as descriptive as possible, as if you are describing the image to a blind person.

Use commas to separate descriptions. If some of the characters or objects have proper names, you can also include them so that later during generation you can just refer to it by name and the model will know what you are looking to create.

You’ll also need to pick some sample prompts. These text prompts will be used during training to generate sample images so that you can evaluate how the custom style is doing.

We’d recommend at least 3 sample prompts that cover a range of intended use cases. For example, if you have a custom style that is meant for inventory objects, you could the following example prompts

Once Layer completes training a model for your custom style, it will generate several variations. When layer trains a model, it takes several guesses at what might have the best results and picks one for you, but that means you can also manually go in and inspect each variation and see if there is one that is better.

Click on “Style Variations” to see your custom style’s variations. For each of the sample prompts, a sample image will be generated in the custom style. Pick the one that you think works the best across your prompts.

After a few moments, your style will complete. At this stage, you can start forging with it!

After completing your style, you can use it to create assets using prompts.

Prompts are written instructions to help guide an AI model on what asset to generate. However, just like learning a new language, there’s a specific way to talk to the AI to get the results you’re looking for.