I haven't been commenting on these threads, but my take is basically this:
IDK if it would be considered "fair use" or not, but I still don't think it qualifies as copyright infringement. Its basically like an artist looking up a reference and using that to create something inspired by it. It would only infringe on the copyright if the asset is too similar to the original asset. I know the argument is "they're taking existing art, editing it, and mixing it with other things", but I don't think that's actually what's happening, nor did the existing court cases that came out make that argument.
The courts basically said AI art "prompts" are like making a commission from an artist. Its the artist's interpretation of what information you give them, and by default, the artist in question owns the copyright. However, only humans can own copyrights. For AI generated art, the "artist" in this case is the algorithm, not a person. As such, AI generated art without much human input cannot be copyrighted.
By starting with the assumption that this is like a commissioned work, they're already somewhat setting the narrative of where their thinking lies here.
Even though that is my stance on AI art, we will see how the courts decide this, and I do have one more comment...
I have no sympathy for any companies claiming "yeah we're not using copyrighted assets" and they actually are. That is blatantly lying and is a potential criminal offense. In such a case they'd be better off not saying anything than outright lying about it.
Oh, one other thing:
"evolving" an image I think _would_ qualify as being derivative. Because you're using that image as the starting point. The algorithms are created by scanning existing art and putting that into the algorithm, but its starting from scratch normally. It starts with a blank canvas and simply follows the algorithm. Evolving art, however, starts from an existing artwork and applies the algorithm over it. That is a much different situation.
I just noticed this now. I was a bit concerned by the layout, I thought you were providing the downloads without simply linking back to the sources. But no, this looks good. You're describing each item, saying who makes it, and the download links actually go to the pages where the extensions are. That's fine, though I do think maybe the Download link should say "Go To Website" instead.
Finally released this. I finished all LPC Revised assets. Eliza's LPC Revised doesn't have the legacy Cast, Thrust, Shoot, or Down, and Legacy Slash on LPC Revised is outdated. On top of that, some assets were missing from Eliza's combat animations, so I had to finish all of these things to get them up.
For now, the clothing assets are not mapped to the "Male" animations yet. LPC Revised only has "Masculine, Thin" and "Feminine, Thin" which are equivalent to "Teen" and "Female" respectively. As such, although "Teen" and "Female" have clothing assets on idle/run/jump/revised combat/sit, the "Male" assets with the thicker body do not at this time. The exception is Overalls; bluecarrot already did Overalls, so I just finished those assets as well. In theory I can use the Overalls to finish the pants assets, but I want to move onto other things for now. Eventually I will do them, though.
I haven't updated this in a while, but after a couple months of not doing much I finally came back to working on finishing this up. My intent is to finish off the LPC Revised conversions before I do the big release I had planned.
Out of all the LPC Revised assets, everything has been implemented except the following:
Overalls
All Pants/Legs Assets
Socks / Shoes / Boots
Cardigan (I want to adjust the sleeves to fit the sleeve pattern on the default Cardigan)
Wings on Combat Frames (all other wing frames are done)
Arming Sword
The only reason I haven't finished Cardigan yet is because the sleeves have a "cuff" pattern on them. The sleeves for the regular shirts (which I already finished) are pretty generic, so I was able to easily just map all layers over the sleeves and past them over all styles.
I just finished up the Heater Shield, along with _all_ patterns, including the patterns that previously were unfinished. That PR hasn't been merged yet, so those assets aren't yet available on the ULPC.
I'm planning to finish the Combat frames for the wings next. All other frames are mapped, its only the combat animations I have yet to finish at this time. I'm hoping to finish this stuff up within the next month or so, after which point I'll drop a full relaese on OGA for all this.
I could drop in some lesser assets as separate releases, but I feel like I really do want to do this whole thing first. It just makes sense because a big part of this is Eliza's combat animations. And my intent is that as more base frames get added, eventually those get added to the ULPC as well. It is, well, the "universal" LPC spritesheet generator after all, so it makes sense to truly make it universal.
By request (and with some help from Sanderfranken) the generator also now has an animation filter. You can filter assets by which assets support specific animations.
That being said, I'm also looking into other areas as well. Been heavily considering delving into FE GBA style sprites, too, which obviously cannot be released here (unless they're fully custom, of which I don't have much experience with that yet). So that might hold me back from doing stuff on OGA. But I want to go back and forth so I don't burn out on just one thing.
The next release I'm planning is a pretty big one but I need to compile enough assets over at ULPC first before I want to do it, so it may take a bit longer before I offiically put up a release on OGA. That being said, there's some big updates coming through over at the ULPC right now:
Originally I tried configuring alternate animations via custom animations but it was too slow to do it effectively. Sanderfrenken brought up another idea, that being to just add all the assets directly to the universal set. Well, I ran some tests, and far as I can tell it works fine. I was able to expand the bodies and heads to encompass all the extra animations, as well as bringing in all new base animations Eliza added to LPC Revised, so we have a much bigger lineup of animations now:
That said, the assets are still missing for much of this. However, the original base animations still work even without them being filled out. I have, however, already finished creating all the mapping for all of the LPC Revised hairstyles as well as all of the various types of ears so far. I want to have a healthy selection of assets first before making an official release.
Adding in the "combat" animations was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I was only focusing on the original assets, Climb, and doing Revised Run, but then I realized that I should just add the new combat animations right away just so they're in place. Plus Eliza has a lot of assets mapped to these already anyway, so it just made sense to include that as well. This is, after all, the "Universal" LPC Character Generator, so it makes sense to just add new base animations as they are created... and due to the way the generator works, it doesn't break the old animations either even if they're not fully filled out to all frames, so that's a nice advantage.
So far I have mapped out all of the hairstyles that exist on LPC Revised and all of the LPC Revised clothing assets (these are, however, missing "down", "cast", "thrust", an "shoot"). I also mapped a few of my hairstyles and ALL of the ears, both the old ear variations (elven, big, long) and all the ears I created. I even added these ears to child, as the old ears (elven, big, long) were missing on child.
I'm also working on trying to clean up some of my older hairstyles and add animations to them, and finish the new hairstyles I was designing as well. These new hairstyle designs would be a separate release of course, but I wanted to wait until we finalized the new Universal asset positions first before doing so.
So I went back and double-checked, but I have confirmed now that all licenses are valid. I updated this to OGA-BY in 2022 but I didn't properly confirm all derivatives were updated to OGA-BY, but they were. So we're good with the licensing here!
I guess I might as well drop some new updates. I decided to go back to doing some new hairstyle variations:
This one is a variation of my XLong Ponytail hairstyle. I liked the main hairstyle enough that I thought this would work nicely as a standalone. I guess you could say this is a version of the same hairstyle if it was loose. I'm calling it "XLong Wavy" because it is extra long and it waves back and forth when walking. I do not yet know how I'm going to handle the Jump/Run, because its not a ponytail in theory it shouldn't move around as much as the existing Run animation goes.
Here's an animated version:
Here's a totally brand new hairstyle:
I forgot to include the "back" hair on the first one. Basically the bottom of the hair is visible in front of the legs at the bottom, but the rest is behind the arm. However, perhaps I should include that anyway, but if I do so, it might confilict with different body sizes, so I'm mixed on it.
The first variation includes new Hair Extensions as well. I decided to make them separate hair extensions and I'll have both variations available on both sides. This one is based on another OC of mine "Princess Shayala".
I'm calling this one "XLong Wavy" as it is designed to be a hairstyle that waves back and forth and its very long.
This one will go into the "Curly" category, but its also a Very Long hairstyle. Not as long as the above two, but still quite long:
I really like the design, but I don't like the lack of animation on the back. I feel like it should be moving around. But its also a very complicated hairstyle to animate which makes that a bigger issue. For now I won't animated it on this frame at least. I know for sure I need to animate it on Run. Even Eliza only added animations for her "Curly" hairstyles on Run and Jump.
Lastly, two new Hair Extensions:
I used this hairstyle because it looks good enouggh to work for the OC who needs these straight bangs. The only addition here are the straight bangs, which I'm adding as new "Hair Extensions". No animations on this one, its not necessary because the bangs are so short. They will be animated on Run and Jump of course.
One final thing, Sanderfrenken and I are looking into how to add other base animations to the ULPC:
My thought originally was to try and keep the animations separate because I thought it'd be a pain to add them into the main ULPC especially with how long its been static. However, Sanderfrenken suggested to include them in the main sheet after all. I opened a PR with this idea in mind, still waiting on a response back. Here's my current thought behind it:
In my testing this works pretty well. All of the existing assets still work fine. Even though those sheets are smaller, it doesn't try to like "stretch" them to fit the entire canvas. It just plops them on top exactly where they were. I added Eliza's Climb because I really wanted Climb, I'll probably do the two Male variation models to fill in those gaps. Below Climb is Idle, Jump, Sit, and Run, in that order. Although Idle is short, I figured eventually its possible we may add in Eliza's animations as well, so to the right of "Idle" we could add in her "Combat Idle" as well.
I'm waiting on Sanderfrenken to respond back before finalizing this. Once it is finalized, I'll start adding in all my existing assets to these frames, and it'll be a bit easier for me to remember to drop these frames in if I have them on the complete universal sheet, too.
Because I'm waiting on final confirmation, though, I'm holding back on doing a lot more at the moment.
Yeah I was thinking that fairy-style wings could be the next ones, but mostly I'm just working on cleaning these up for now, adding them to all frames (even Eliza only had four of the animations using the wings), and then my next goal is to make "arm wing" variants. But yeah, maybe I could potentially look into creating a fairy like wing later just to fill in the trifecta.
EDIT:
Sanderfrenken merged the PR now, so the wings are now up here:
In addition I also made a couple of quick minor fixes. Ponytail2 had some skintone issues and Bedhead's second-to-last "down" animation was too far down. These were sitting in Issues for a long time so I finally just got them out of the way:
Another update, I finished the run animation for the wings as well as adjusting the side running animations:
I have some concerns with the side animations, because I noticed when combined with the wings it is kinda iffy. If I drop both the hair and wings then the hair suddenly appears in front of the wings at one point, due to the two frames where I have the "side hair" shifting from the background to the foreground, to try and replicate the idea of it coming alongside the body. This was fairly difficult, but I think it looks decent, and certainly way better than the original.
Really hard to figure out how to replicate the same effect from the side, but finally I just reused the same frames and tweaked them a bit.
As for the wings, its really just opening and closing. I think its neat to have that animations, but I'm mixed on the idea of that being the only thing it does on run. However, its also better than just nothing happening either, so I think it looks pretty decent.
Bat wings I didn't get a chance to do yet for run, still need to do jump as well.
EDIT: Another note on the wings... I considered swapping the order of frames on each wing. Not sure if I should or not, but its a possibility.
EDIT 2: I noticed a stray pixel in the side wing so I fixed that, not in the preview, but I fixed it in my version.
I haven't been commenting on these threads, but my take is basically this:
IDK if it would be considered "fair use" or not, but I still don't think it qualifies as copyright infringement. Its basically like an artist looking up a reference and using that to create something inspired by it. It would only infringe on the copyright if the asset is too similar to the original asset. I know the argument is "they're taking existing art, editing it, and mixing it with other things", but I don't think that's actually what's happening, nor did the existing court cases that came out make that argument.
The courts basically said AI art "prompts" are like making a commission from an artist. Its the artist's interpretation of what information you give them, and by default, the artist in question owns the copyright. However, only humans can own copyrights. For AI generated art, the "artist" in this case is the algorithm, not a person. As such, AI generated art without much human input cannot be copyrighted.
By starting with the assumption that this is like a commissioned work, they're already somewhat setting the narrative of where their thinking lies here.
Even though that is my stance on AI art, we will see how the courts decide this, and I do have one more comment...
I have no sympathy for any companies claiming "yeah we're not using copyrighted assets" and they actually are. That is blatantly lying and is a potential criminal offense. In such a case they'd be better off not saying anything than outright lying about it.
Oh, one other thing:
"evolving" an image I think _would_ qualify as being derivative. Because you're using that image as the starting point. The algorithms are created by scanning existing art and putting that into the algorithm, but its starting from scratch normally. It starts with a blank canvas and simply follows the algorithm. Evolving art, however, starts from an existing artwork and applies the algorithm over it. That is a much different situation.
I just noticed this now. I was a bit concerned by the layout, I thought you were providing the downloads without simply linking back to the sources. But no, this looks good. You're describing each item, saying who makes it, and the download links actually go to the pages where the extensions are. That's fine, though I do think maybe the Download link should say "Go To Website" instead.
https://opengameart.org/content/expanded-universal-lpc-spritesheet-idle-...
Finally released this. I finished all LPC Revised assets. Eliza's LPC Revised doesn't have the legacy Cast, Thrust, Shoot, or Down, and Legacy Slash on LPC Revised is outdated. On top of that, some assets were missing from Eliza's combat animations, so I had to finish all of these things to get them up.
For now, the clothing assets are not mapped to the "Male" animations yet. LPC Revised only has "Masculine, Thin" and "Feminine, Thin" which are equivalent to "Teen" and "Female" respectively. As such, although "Teen" and "Female" have clothing assets on idle/run/jump/revised combat/sit, the "Male" assets with the thicker body do not at this time. The exception is Overalls; bluecarrot already did Overalls, so I just finished those assets as well. In theory I can use the Overalls to finish the pants assets, but I want to move onto other things for now. Eventually I will do them, though.
All right, I finally purchased the mega pack. Hope that helps a bit.
I haven't updated this in a while, but after a couple months of not doing much I finally came back to working on finishing this up. My intent is to finish off the LPC Revised conversions before I do the big release I had planned.
Out of all the LPC Revised assets, everything has been implemented except the following:
The only reason I haven't finished Cardigan yet is because the sleeves have a "cuff" pattern on them. The sleeves for the regular shirts (which I already finished) are pretty generic, so I was able to easily just map all layers over the sleeves and past them over all styles.
I just finished up the Heater Shield, along with _all_ patterns, including the patterns that previously were unfinished. That PR hasn't been merged yet, so those assets aren't yet available on the ULPC.
I'm planning to finish the Combat frames for the wings next. All other frames are mapped, its only the combat animations I have yet to finish at this time. I'm hoping to finish this stuff up within the next month or so, after which point I'll drop a full relaese on OGA for all this.
I could drop in some lesser assets as separate releases, but I feel like I really do want to do this whole thing first. It just makes sense because a big part of this is Eliza's combat animations. And my intent is that as more base frames get added, eventually those get added to the ULPC as well. It is, well, the "universal" LPC spritesheet generator after all, so it makes sense to truly make it universal.
By request (and with some help from Sanderfranken) the generator also now has an animation filter. You can filter assets by which assets support specific animations.
That being said, I'm also looking into other areas as well. Been heavily considering delving into FE GBA style sprites, too, which obviously cannot be released here (unless they're fully custom, of which I don't have much experience with that yet). So that might hold me back from doing stuff on OGA. But I want to go back and forth so I don't burn out on just one thing.
I guess I'll drop some new updates.
The next release I'm planning is a pretty big one but I need to compile enough assets over at ULPC first before I want to do it, so it may take a bit longer before I offiically put up a release on OGA. That being said, there's some big updates coming through over at the ULPC right now:
https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...
Originally I tried configuring alternate animations via custom animations but it was too slow to do it effectively. Sanderfrenken brought up another idea, that being to just add all the assets directly to the universal set. Well, I ran some tests, and far as I can tell it works fine. I was able to expand the bodies and heads to encompass all the extra animations, as well as bringing in all new base animations Eliza added to LPC Revised, so we have a much bigger lineup of animations now:
That said, the assets are still missing for much of this. However, the original base animations still work even without them being filled out. I have, however, already finished creating all the mapping for all of the LPC Revised hairstyles as well as all of the various types of ears so far. I want to have a healthy selection of assets first before making an official release.
Adding in the "combat" animations was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I was only focusing on the original assets, Climb, and doing Revised Run, but then I realized that I should just add the new combat animations right away just so they're in place. Plus Eliza has a lot of assets mapped to these already anyway, so it just made sense to include that as well. This is, after all, the "Universal" LPC Character Generator, so it makes sense to just add new base animations as they are created... and due to the way the generator works, it doesn't break the old animations either even if they're not fully filled out to all frames, so that's a nice advantage.
So far I have mapped out all of the hairstyles that exist on LPC Revised and all of the LPC Revised clothing assets (these are, however, missing "down", "cast", "thrust", an "shoot"). I also mapped a few of my hairstyles and ALL of the ears, both the old ear variations (elven, big, long) and all the ears I created. I even added these ears to child, as the old ears (elven, big, long) were missing on child.
I'm also working on trying to clean up some of my older hairstyles and add animations to them, and finish the new hairstyles I was designing as well. These new hairstyle designs would be a separate release of course, but I wanted to wait until we finalized the new Universal asset positions first before doing so.
So I went back and double-checked, but I have confirmed now that all licenses are valid. I updated this to OGA-BY in 2022 but I didn't properly confirm all derivatives were updated to OGA-BY, but they were. So we're good with the licensing here!
I had considered the possibility of doing these eventually, but someone else already put them out:
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-fairy-wings
That was convenient timing!
I guess I might as well drop some new updates. I decided to go back to doing some new hairstyle variations:
This one is a variation of my XLong Ponytail hairstyle. I liked the main hairstyle enough that I thought this would work nicely as a standalone. I guess you could say this is a version of the same hairstyle if it was loose. I'm calling it "XLong Wavy" because it is extra long and it waves back and forth when walking. I do not yet know how I'm going to handle the Jump/Run, because its not a ponytail in theory it shouldn't move around as much as the existing Run animation goes.
Here's an animated version:
Here's a totally brand new hairstyle:
I forgot to include the "back" hair on the first one. Basically the bottom of the hair is visible in front of the legs at the bottom, but the rest is behind the arm. However, perhaps I should include that anyway, but if I do so, it might confilict with different body sizes, so I'm mixed on it.
The first variation includes new Hair Extensions as well. I decided to make them separate hair extensions and I'll have both variations available on both sides. This one is based on another OC of mine "Princess Shayala".
I'm calling this one "XLong Wavy" as it is designed to be a hairstyle that waves back and forth and its very long.
This one will go into the "Curly" category, but its also a Very Long hairstyle. Not as long as the above two, but still quite long:
I really like the design, but I don't like the lack of animation on the back. I feel like it should be moving around. But its also a very complicated hairstyle to animate which makes that a bigger issue. For now I won't animated it on this frame at least. I know for sure I need to animate it on Run. Even Eliza only added animations for her "Curly" hairstyles on Run and Jump.
Lastly, two new Hair Extensions:
I used this hairstyle because it looks good enouggh to work for the OC who needs these straight bangs. The only addition here are the straight bangs, which I'm adding as new "Hair Extensions". No animations on this one, its not necessary because the bangs are so short. They will be animated on Run and Jump of course.
One final thing, Sanderfrenken and I are looking into how to add other base animations to the ULPC:
https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...
My thought originally was to try and keep the animations separate because I thought it'd be a pain to add them into the main ULPC especially with how long its been static. However, Sanderfrenken suggested to include them in the main sheet after all. I opened a PR with this idea in mind, still waiting on a response back. Here's my current thought behind it:
In my testing this works pretty well. All of the existing assets still work fine. Even though those sheets are smaller, it doesn't try to like "stretch" them to fit the entire canvas. It just plops them on top exactly where they were. I added Eliza's Climb because I really wanted Climb, I'll probably do the two Male variation models to fill in those gaps. Below Climb is Idle, Jump, Sit, and Run, in that order. Although Idle is short, I figured eventually its possible we may add in Eliza's animations as well, so to the right of "Idle" we could add in her "Combat Idle" as well.
I'm waiting on Sanderfrenken to respond back before finalizing this. Once it is finalized, I'll start adding in all my existing assets to these frames, and it'll be a bit easier for me to remember to drop these frames in if I have them on the complete universal sheet, too.
Because I'm waiting on final confirmation, though, I'm holding back on doing a lot more at the moment.
Yeah I was thinking that fairy-style wings could be the next ones, but mostly I'm just working on cleaning these up for now, adding them to all frames (even Eliza only had four of the animations using the wings), and then my next goal is to make "arm wing" variants. But yeah, maybe I could potentially look into creating a fairy like wing later just to fill in the trifecta.
EDIT:
Sanderfrenken merged the PR now, so the wings are now up here:
https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene...
In addition I also made a couple of quick minor fixes. Ponytail2 had some skintone issues and Bedhead's second-to-last "down" animation was too far down. These were sitting in Issues for a long time so I finally just got them out of the way:
https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...
https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...
I just need to fix the animated hair PR now so that can get updated on the ULPC.
Another update, I finished the run animation for the wings as well as adjusting the side running animations:
I have some concerns with the side animations, because I noticed when combined with the wings it is kinda iffy. If I drop both the hair and wings then the hair suddenly appears in front of the wings at one point, due to the two frames where I have the "side hair" shifting from the background to the foreground, to try and replicate the idea of it coming alongside the body. This was fairly difficult, but I think it looks decent, and certainly way better than the original.
Really hard to figure out how to replicate the same effect from the side, but finally I just reused the same frames and tweaked them a bit.
As for the wings, its really just opening and closing. I think its neat to have that animations, but I'm mixed on the idea of that being the only thing it does on run. However, its also better than just nothing happening either, so I think it looks pretty decent.
Bat wings I didn't get a chance to do yet for run, still need to do jump as well.
EDIT: Another note on the wings... I considered swapping the order of frames on each wing. Not sure if I should or not, but its a possibility.
EDIT 2: I noticed a stray pixel in the side wing so I fixed that, not in the preview, but I fixed it in my version.
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