NVIDIA Canvas apps: How to turn doodles into art

Sometimes the hardest part of the creative process is just beginning. It can be very intimidating to look at a blank canvas before bringing your fantasy to life. Wouldn't it be incredible if with a simple brushstroke we could harness the power of artificial intelligence technology to turn a simple drawing into an amazingly realistic real-time image?

What is NVIDIA Canvas

NVIDIA Canvas, formerly known as NVIDIA GauGAN, is a free drawing application that uses sophisticated artificial intelligence models to turn simple brush strokes into realistic landscapes. The program is aimed at creative people and artists, but if you have the right hardware, we recommend downloading it and giving it a try.

NVIDIA Canvas is accelerated using tensor cores, which are only found in NVIDIA RTX GPUs. This means that you will need a GeForce RTX, NVIDIA RTX, or TITAN RTX GPU to run NVIDIA Canvas. To begin working with NVIDIA Canvas, you can download and install the beta directly from the NVIDIA website.

NVIDIA Canvas user interface

When you first launch NVIDIA Canvas, you'll feel right at home if you're familiar with the interface of modern photo editing applications like Photoshop or GIMP. Beginning with the top menu, you'll find:

• File handling options, including New File, Open File, and Save File;
• An export button;
• Undo and Redo navigation arrows;
• Feedback and settings icons.

The left pane contains the toolbar:

• Brush, Line, and Eraser tools;
• The Fill tool, the Material Selection tool, and the Pan tool;
• Brush Size tool.

The right pane contains:

• Material Palette;
• Styles section, where you can import new styles;
• The Layers section, where you can add layers.

The center workspace contains:

• Segmentation Map: This is where you draw;
• Output Image: This is where the AI model outputs the resulting image after each brush stroke. In the settings, you can disable the automatic painting feature and invoke Artificial Intelligence manually by pressing F5 on the keyboard.

Keyboard shortcuts

In addition to the on-screen controls, the following keyboard shortcuts can help you save time.

• Pan: Hold down the spacebar and drag the image with the left mouse button;
• Undo: Ctrl + Z;
• Repeat: Ctrl + Y;
• Zoom in: Ctrl and + keys;
• Zoom out: Ctrl + -;
• Switch to full screen mode: Shift + F or F11;
• Exit full screen mode: Esc key;
• Save: Ctrl + S;
• Increase brush size: Ctrl + ];
• Decrease brush size: Ctrl + [.

Using Layers

Although you can paint everything on a single layer, it makes sense to separate the foreground, midground, and background elements into separate layers. That way, you can separate and adjust individual layers without affecting the image as a whole. Also, since layers can overlap, images with multiple layers can help blend transitions between elements.

How NVIDIA Canvas uses AI

NVIDIA Canvas uses artificial intelligence to turn simple brush strokes into realistic landscapes. This allows you to quickly create backgrounds or speed up the ideation process so you have more time to visualize your ideas.

Draw simple shapes and lines using real objects like grass or clouds. And then watch as the advanced artificial intelligence model creates stunning effects in real time. Don't like the effect? Change the material, such as replacing snow with grass, and the entire image transforms from a winter landscape to a tropical paradise. With this tool, users can express their art in a variety of environments.

Customize your palette

With NVIDIA Canvas, you can customize your artwork to your liking. You can use nine styles in standard mode, eight styles in panorama mode, and different materials such as skies, mountains, rivers, and rocks to change the look and mood of your painting. You can also paint at different levels to separate other objects. You can begin from scratch or use one of the modeled scenes to get started quickly.

360° inspiration

Because NVIDIA Canvas supports 360° panoramas, artists can use Canvas to quickly create landscape paintings. Panoramas provide a cropped view of scenes in a painting, and authors can enhance the realism of their photos by customizing the localization of each scene. This is a fantastic tool for artists and designers to express innovative ideas. They can also be exported as an isometric environment for display in any 3D application. In addition, artists can use these maps to change the background lighting of a 3D scene and add shadows to make it look more realistic.

Conclusion

Nvidia Canvas is a modern tool that helps you create beautiful images and scenes that look just like the real thing. With its help, you can easily turn simple sketches into stunning surrealistic works of art that usually require a lot of skill and experience when working manually. This tool comes with many amazing features such as multiple materials, layers, color palettes, 360-degree panoramas, other design elements and artificial intelligence support. Its user interface is intuitive and simple, making the platform easy to use for both beginning and experienced designers.

In addition, the images and scenes created with NVIDIA Canvas are impressive in terms of quality and time spent. The images you create look very realistic and can be used in a wide range of applications, from game development to content creation. So if you're a concept artist, content creator, or enthusiast, you'll find this tool invaluable for bringing your ideas to life.