Welcome to Layer. This short guide will run you through the basics of the Layer platform and help you create your first piece of professional game art.

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Making an account on Layer is easy and free for all users. Just click “Sign Up” in the top right to get started. We recommend creating an account using your existing Google Gmail account.

Review and accept the Terms of Service and Data Processing Policy.

Once accepted, you will now be inside the Layer workspace and asked to forge your first image.

Follow the instructions, or feel free to skip right into advanced usage.

Forging your first asset is easy, and our platform takes you through the initial steps. To start the process, follow the instructions and select from our list of official styles. These styles are officially supported by Layer and are designed to help you create professional assets for a variety of different game types and scenarios.

Select "Forge" on the lefthand side.

Select a style in the top left. These are different AI models and pre-trained Layer styles.

Once you’ve chosen a style, it’s time to create your first prompt. This “prompt” or description is how to tell the AI generation model exactly what you want. The more descriptive the better, as it helps the AI narrow down the type of image from millions of inputs.

Creating a great prompt is the key to generating the best assets, but it takes practice. You can check out our full guide on prompt generation, but in the meantime here are some simple tips:

You can also leverage AI to help you refine your prompt - pretty meta right? This can be a great way to add more specificity to what you’re trying to generate. However, we always advise you look over and edit the AI generated prompt as well to ensure it’s exactly what you need.

Layer comes fully equipped with a portfolio of styles to choose from. These range from 8-bit pixel art to hi-def realistic artwork - and everything in between. Simple click the style in the bottom left of the prompt box at any time to select from a list with visual examples.

Layer also supports the creation of your own unique style. With this feature you can upload your own artwork and train a custom model, allowing you to create iterations of art you already have. This is especially helpful when scaling game assets created by artists inside your studio.

This feature is available for Layer Pro, Studio, and Enterprise accounts.

Once you’re happy with your forged image, it’s time to head to the Canvas to edit and export your asset. Simply click “Edit and Refine” on the right side of the screen to switch to the Canvas view.

The Layer Canvas is a powerful tool for creating specific variations of generated assets, and editing them in real-time. This allows you to fine tune your assets to match your game art before exporting as a PSD.

Editing assets is easy with the Canvas. Once you have your image, select from the options at the bottom of the screen to get started. For more info, check out our full guide for editing assets in the Canvas.

Each of these provides a different method of selecting parts of your image, with pros and cons.

In this example the Lasso tool was used to select the head of our cyberpunk gal.

You can now add prompt direction for this specific part of the image. This is extremely useful for editing parts of your image without changing the overall asset.

Cropping your image is easy and straightforward. Cropping allows you to quickly slice away unwanted portions of your image, and expanding uses AI to expand on what you already have. For a more detailed guide on cropping and expanding click here.

Crop: Simply select the “Crop” option in the right hand side of the toolbar, then select the part of your image you want to crop.

Expanding: Using the same tool, drag to expand an area outside of your existing image. Then, click “Refill” to generate a whole new area - expanding your image.

Now that you’ve edited and expanded your image, you’re ready to export the final asset for use in your game. Click “Export” in the top right corner and select the best option. Remember, if you want access to all the layers in a program like Adobe Photoshop you will need to select “PSD”.

4.1 Sessions

Once you start forging, it can be hard to stop - and it’s easy to end up with 1000s of assets. You can easily manage everything under Sessions, which gives you access to your generations in chronological order.

4.2 Layer Library

Once you start creating a lot of game assets such as characters, UI elements, and backgrounds - it’s important to know how to effectively manage your WIP assets and exports as well as the important files.

Layer makes it easy with a Library where you can access and organize all your projects. This serves as a central place for accessing your imports, exports, styles, and WIP assets.

To continue from where you left off, you can simply double click on the asset which will take you into the Editable Canvas view. There you can see a history of the image and edits made during your previous session.

By now you should be familiar with Layers basics and successfully forging assets for your game. If you’re looking for more powerful features such as faster forging or organization management - we’ve got you covered.

How many images can I forge with a Free account?

600 per month.

How many styles do I have access to?

40+ styles which includes Starter Styles trained by Layer team as well as the open source styles. If you like to Layer to create in your style, you can do so with Layer PRO and above plans.