AI and deep learning seem to have no limits: image restoration, animated paintings, Renaissance portraits, anime transformations… but there’s always a new challenge. What about becoming a character in animated films? Toonify does it in a couple of clicks, and as you might expect, the social media attention left it down for a while.
Fortunately, Toonify’s downtime was brief thanks to the intervention of DeepAI (now handling the backend) and contributors via Ko-fi. The development is led by Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler, and their work is based on a combination of StyleGAN models processed with image-to-image translation in pix2pixHD. The recommendation for best results is simple: high-definition portraits without obstacles. What about glasses? Toonify learned to remove them (to some extent), considering not many animated characters wear them.
The service’s creators confirm they do not save the images, neither the originals nor the generated ones, but I still suggest using public images you’ve already shared on social media. Want to know how well it works? Then this gallery of celebrities should be more than enough…
Gallery: Famous Faces as Animated Characters
(Editor’s note: I think it gives better results with women, right?)
Official site: Click here
