Ancient alien stone relief

Alien Covenant fan piece — Alien engineer stone relief. Big love for that poster (and Giger, obviously).

Usually I’m pure SD end-to-end. This time I wanted to see if AI could actually slot into the pipeline instead of being the whole thing. Wrote a tiny plugin hooked to GPT Image 2 in the cloud, cranked out a bunch of images off the Covenant poster + Giger refs, picked the one that felt usable, ran it through DA2, seasoned with my sd stone wall pipeline, rendered in Marmoset.

For a hero sculpt like this, sitting in ZBrush would’ve been way faster for tight art direction. For AI you’d be grinding thousands of gens to get there otherwise. In the future i probably would put AI on the small stuff — turning refs into bits and elements I could use.

So yeah — tool in the box, not a replacement for sculpting. Learned a ton though.