“Robin Nood”: Furries use AI technology to recreate Disney movie without clothes
by Patch O'Furr
Are you one of the masses with a crush on Disney’s Robin Hood?
That fox may have created more furries than any other beloved character, and they create huge amounts of fan art. Sexy, sexy fan art.
Artists: Sandblastcoyote and Paintfox34
The weirdos who search the net for Sexy Robin Hood, like this author, mostly get still illustrations or very small bits of animation that can barely quench their burning desire. Until now.
A secret work group of furries have been pushing the limits of AI technology to deliver the worst nightmare for Disney’s Family Moral Standards department. It’s the long anticipated full movie fan edit where Robin Hood is as bare as he leaves the King’s treasury, and he’s showing off all his jewels.
To explain how this technological breakthrough was achieved, let’s start with a conceptual creation by Changa Husky. He lives at the Prancing Skiltaire house in California, a long-time haven for pioneers of fandom. Changa used to make effects for 1990’s science fiction TV shows and now works with Furality, the VR convention. Around 2018, Changa was inspired to make a bootleg VHS release of Disney’s Zootopia featuring period-authentic pan-and-scan formatting, trailers for other fan works, and vintage marketing materials in a clamshell box. It was Mandela Effect prank art from an alternate universe. Yes, it’s real.
Changa’s unique Zootopia VHS release only went to a few special furries. Some of them were inspired to take the concept farther, and now Robin Nood is here.
How hard was it to generate a fan edit to feature Robin Hood’s full-frontal anatomical correctness, like his fluffy but well-toned abs that invite nuzzling, not to mention the rogueish fox’s muscular buttocks that you could only imagine under his forest bandit tunic before?
It’s hard to ask the secret work group behind Robin Nood, who refused to comment while they avoid Disney lawyers behind a cloak of anonymity. Some questions were sent to the artist Wizardhead (Brendan Baldwin) because he was in a previous Dogpatch Press article about AI. How did they do it?
Baldwin replied:
The length of the render is mostly relevant in that the proliferation of angles and different kinds of shots involved might need tweaking for whatever algorithm is applied. I’m not familiar with any approach to targeted rendering of character bodies in a consistent way and to date I’ve seen no examples of this which lead me to believe it is either cheap or easy. Most of what I do is fairly transformative but intrinsically chaotic and somewhat visually incoherent, which is very different than what the deepfake videos do by creating very exacting targeted replacement of video subjects. If quality and coherence were not relevant, then after maybe a day of experimenting one could arrive at an appropriate model to apply to the spectrum of scenes in the target film and the only real work there would be chopping up the work into manageable bites, dishing them out to the rendering machines and compiling them all together at the end. Long form video tends to require the chopping-up treatment when running it frame by frame through these systems because per-frame storage even at 1280×768 for example runs about 1.8MB and that adds up crazy quick. For reference, if I took Zootopia and ran the whole thing through the model I used for my Slimefeld video, it would probably cost me about $400 in computer rentals and about 8 hours of time chopping and midwifing through the systems and recompiling. Just to cost it out conceptually, if I was to use my approach as a model for your friend, my break even costs for doing something like that would run $1200 (@100/hr labor/opportunity) and if I was going to do a job like that for someone I’d probably charge about $2500 so I could double my out-of-pocket costs to make a profit. Now as for making the characters naked (I assume just with matching animal fur etc) I don’t honestly know how one would coherently achieve that via the AI tools out right now in a low-labor or cost-effective way, but I’m sure someone smarter than me with a lot of time could figure it out.
Furries pushed the technology farther than even a seasoned expert knew how to do it. Wow!
Like the VHS bootleg of Zootopia that really exists, this recreation of a Disney movie only exists as limited edition physical media. You have to know someone to get a copy. Good luck everybody!
Note: Dogpatch Press doesn’t endorse using AI images because the systems that make them are unethical. Memes and conceptual projects with no commercial purpose may be less harmful but the systems also burn up energy that hurts the planet. Their misuse is toxic and their overuse dilutes real art. The feeling of seeing a bunch of AI images can be like enjoying pretty gift wrap, which lasts a minute until you rip it up and throw it away and never think about it again. If you care about art and want it to last, hire a real artist who puts thought and care into what they make, not just math to put other art in a blender and barf it back out. This applies most to replacing human artists for certain jobs, but one like Wizardhead still displays inventive use of absurd juxtaposition and editing prowess no matter what the tools are. And of course, the artists who animated Robin Hood weren’t allowed to give his fans the extra-sexy version we all long for, so it was meant to be willed into existence somehow.
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“math to put other art in a blender and barf it back out”
Really, Patch? Can you even be sure that’s how it works?
Quoting a friend who read this.
“As a double major in math and computer science engineering, yeah. It’s so much linear algebra with matricies so large nobody’s really sure what data gets stored in it.
I made image object recognition software in 2006 for a class project, and the professor thought I cheated somehow because he couldn’t understand it.”
Is this real?
What a shame this site is promoting AI when the fandom is literally built on real artists.
You just got disinvited from the screening party for Robin Nood. Sucks to be you!
This fandom was built and is sustained by artists who make copyright-infringing fan art of other people’s IP. I wouldn’t exactly say furry artists have the moral high ground.