21 Ai Generation

Chapter 21 — 🤖 AI Image Generation

🎯 Goal: Generate pixel art from a text prompt using an external generator of your choosing, and work with the results as ordinary layers.

---

Off by default

AI features are disabled until you ask for them, and while disabled DRAW shows nothing about them at all — no AI menu, no commands, no layer markers, no status text. Enable them in Settings → General → Enable AI Features.

Turning the feature off again hides it completely, including on projects that already contain AI layers: those layers keep working and simply render as ordinary layers.

DRAW does not talk to a model

DRAW runs an external command-line generator that you configure. It builds a command, runs it, and imports the PNG that comes back. You choose the engine, the models, and whether anything leaves your machine.

The bundled example is pixelmon, a local ComfyUI + SDXL pipeline. A test engine (DEV/ai-echo.sh) is also included so you can exercise the whole pipeline in about a second.

Generators live in DRAW.ai.cfg in your config directory. AI → Tools... edits them; the first time you use an AI command with nothing configured, DRAW offers to write a starter file.

---

Generating

AI → New AI Layer... opens the generate dialog.

Field	Notes
Tool	Which configured generator to run
Style	Optional style guide — see below
Preset	A saved prompt; picking one loads it into the prompt box
Prompt	Multi-line, word-wrapped, with selection and clipboard
Size	[IMAGE SIZE] fills in the canvas size; [IMAGE xN] appears only when your display is scaled
Position	3×3 preset grid, or type X/Y directly
Seed	Same seed reproduces a result; [RANDOM] re-rolls
Count	Above 1 generates a batch — see below
SURPRISE ME	Random style, random saved prompt, fresh seed

Generation runs in the background. DRAW stays fully usable, and the status bar shows an animated progress line with the elapsed time. Press Ctrl+Alt+K to abort — this terminates the generator process, it does not merely stop watching it.

Working with a selection

With a selection active, the dialog starts with the selection's size and its top-left corner. The result is scaled to fit inside the selection with its aspect ratio preserved, so nothing is skewed: the limiting dimension fills the selection exactly and the other is centred.

Enlarging is restricted to whole-number factors, because scaling pixel art by a fractional amount resamples it into mush. A small result inside a large selection therefore sits centred at 1×, 2× or 3× rather than being smeared to fill.

---

Batch generation

Set Count above 1 (up to 20) to generate several variations at once. They land in a layer group, and every item shares identical settings — same tool, style, prompt, size and position — differing only by seed. A batch is a set of variations on one idea, not a set of unrelated images.

Seeds run from the seed shown in the dialog upward, so re-running a batch with the same starting seed reproduces the same set.

Items are generated one at a time. The status bar shows progress as [2/10], and Ctrl+Alt+K stops the remainder — anything already generated is kept.

---

AI layers

A generated layer is marked [AI] in the layer panel. Hovering it shows the full prompt, with the engine, model, style and seed beneath.

Right-click an AI layer for:

• Edit Prompt... — change the stored prompt without regenerating
• Regenerate — re-run it, pre-filled with the prompt and seed it was made with

The prompt, style, tool, seed and size are saved in the .draw file, so a layer can be regenerated — or reproduced exactly — after reloading a project.

---

Styles and prompts

AI → Style Editor... manages style guides. A style can:

• wrap your prompt with a prefix and suffix
• add its own CLI arguments (e.g. pixelmon's --style ega)
• be scoped to one tool, since a style name means nothing to a different generator
• lock a seed, so its look is reproducible

⚠️ Command-line flags belong in a style's Args field, not its prefix or suffix. Prefix and suffix are prompt text — a flag placed there is passed inside the quoted prompt and the generator never sees it as a flag. DRAW migrates obviously-misplaced flags automatically and notes it in the log.

AI → Prompt Editor... manages saved prompt presets — plain text starting points you can pick from the generate dialog.

---

Argument macros

A tool's arguments are a template. DRAW expands {macros} before running it, so one configuration adapts to whatever you are working on.

Click [?] in the tool or style editor for a live reference listing every macro alongside its current value, so you can see exactly what your tool will receive.

Group	Macros
Run	{prompt} {style} {seed} {outdir} {outname}
Document	{if} {id} {iw} {ih}
Selection	{sw} {sh}
Layer	{numlayers} {lidx} {lname} {lw} {lh} {lx} {ly}
Brush / grid	{bw} {bh} {gw} {gh}
Colour	{pal} {numpal} {fg} {bg} {pmode}
Context	{tool} {px} {py} {font} {fsize} {fontfile}
Steering	{limg} {dimg} {bimg}

Three rules apply to every macro:

1. Values are whitespace-trimmed.
2. An UPPERCASE name yields an UPPERCASE value — {PAL} gives ANSI32, {pal} gives it as-is. {pal:lower} and {pal:slug} are also available.
3. sc* variants give the screen-scaled value — {sciw} is the image width multiplied by the display scale. Every dimension and position macro has one.

DRAW supplies {outdir} as a fresh directory per run and imports the newest PNG it finds there, so tools that name their own output files work unchanged.

Steering images

{limg}, {dimg} and {bimg} export the current layer, the flattened document and the custom brush as PNGs, for generators that accept a reference image. {dimg} is the artwork only — never DRAW's interface.

---

The log

Every run is recorded in ai.log in your config directory: the full command line, the exit code, the tool's own output, and the imported file or the reason it failed. When a generation misbehaves, that file will tell you why. A failure dialog offers to open it for you.

---

Exercises

1. Enable AI features and let DRAW write the starter config. Generate once with the bundled echo (test) engine to confirm the pipeline end to end.
2. Make a selection, then generate into it. Note that the dialog pre-fills the selection's size and corner.
3. Create a style with a suffix of pixel art, bold outlines and generate the same prompt with and without it.
4. Run a batch of 4 and compare the variations — same prompt, four seeds.
5. Open the [?] macro reference and find three macros whose current values change when you switch tool or palette.

---

➡️ Next: Chapter 22 — Workspaces & Screenshot Annotation