Note. The newer versions of the mod have built-in functionalities for AI-gen, which should be a lot more convenient to use. Please check out this guide on how to set it up. The current guide is still useful if you don't mind doing the generations manually.

If you ever wondered how people make AI-gen portraits of their colonists, this guide will show you how to easily create them, in a consistent style, with almost no setup.

You will be able to produce portraits just like these yourself by the end of the guide ^^

To get consistent portraits, we use the avatars from my mod avatar and feed them to AI as reference; this allows the end results to have a consistent look, while also saves you some manual labor to provide detailed descriptions of your colonists, and spares some computational resources as well. You can see how they serve as an intermediate step between the vanilla blobs and the final portraits.

Of course you could also use the vanilla portraits as reference, or even just use text prompt alone without a reference image. But then getting a desired result would require a lot more effort and tweaking.

So the first step is to install the mod ^^
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3111373293
Once you enabled the avatar mod, an avatar will show up above the info tabs when you select a human pawn (the mod does have some extra features, like integration to the colonist bar, feel free to check them out). Right click on the avatar and save the upscaled version.


The picture will then be saved to your RimWorld user data folder, where your save files can also be found (see wiki[rimworldwiki.com] for more details). Depending on your OS, this would be

• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Appdata\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\avatar
  
• Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld by Ludeon Studios/avatar/
  
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/RimWorld/avatar/

Next we need an AI instance to produce the portraits. If you have a fancy GPU setup, you probably already know how to proceed. For people with a potato laptop like me, there's a marvelous site https://pixai.art (thanks octogiraffe!) where you can sign up for free (with a fake email address and use the limited daily free quota; and if you don't mind making a lot of new accounts or waiting a bit for each image, you basically have unlimited usage).

Once you signed up with your totally legit email and logged in, you should be presented with the "Image Generator" interface, where you have a text prompt to type in.


Upload the avatar that we just got. Fill in the text prompt with a basic description of your colonist. For example, I would simply put

female front portrait, dark skin, dark hair, ponytails, blue t-shirt

On the right hand side, you can pick your choice of the model, which determines the style of your portrait. A lot of them are anime styles, but there are some realistic ones as well as a few more western comics/cartoon-like ones. I'll use one called Real Cartoon 3d.


Then simply click "Let's Go!" to launch the AI (you will notice that the credit cost is reduced to 600, because we provided a reference image, which saves some computational resources; if you uncheck the "High Priority" option, it'll actually cost 0 credit, essentially granting you infinite usage, though you do need to wait a while before seeing the result).

And there you go!

There are a lot of ways to stylize the portraits. Especially if you are into anime styles.

For people who find the anime/cartoon-style portraits a bit too pretty and generic, here are a few tips I discovered to make them look more ordinary and realistic.

On pixai.art there is a model available called PixaiDiffusion(CG), which is the first one listed in the right panel (...). As I understand it, this is a more general-purpose model that's trained on many different art styles instead of a particular (anime) one. And it behaves like the visual version of Randy Random. It generates the portraits in many random art-styles and adds a lot of variety and personalities to the pawns.
It's apparently also more capable at understanding the prompt, so here the stellic crown is not interpreted as "normal crown wearing over blonde hair". Which means you are also free to add more descriptions like "ugly", "angry", "old", "depressive", as traits of the colonists.

Now comes the neat part. It's possible to combine the two styles and get the best of both worlds. Once you make a nice arty portrait using PixaiDiffusion, you can pass that picture as the reference image, and use another model that excels at adding details. I recommend one called noosphere_v3. Note that you do need to lower the strength of the new model to avoid it overwriting too much.
Here I first pass the pixel-art avatars into the PixaiDiffusion model, with a strength of 0.55. Then I pass the result to the noosphere_v3 model, with a strength of 0.45. The results now look more stylish and individualized, instead of all having the face of a super-model.

That's it. Have fun tweaking the models and settings to find a style that you like!

Note. With the last update (thanks to Tiago), you can replace the pixel-art avatar with the AI-gen one: right clicking on the avatar will have the option "Enable static portrait", which creates a png file named like "Tynan_Sylvester_123.png" in the avatar directory. This will be the static portrait displayed for your pawn in place of the pixel-art one. You can replace it with the AI-gen portrait or any image you like, and it'll get updated in-game automatically.

Another useful tip: if you disable the background of the avatar in the mod settings, the AI-gen portrait will have (almost) black background, which can then be easily removed to get a transparent background, like in the screenshot above.

Disclaimer. I'm in no way affiliated with pixai.art (or I wouldn't be teaching you how to cheese its credit system), it's just the first one I found that actually works quite well. There are probably also other websites out there that you can use. For example, https://dezgo.com/image2image also works very well and doesn't even require registration.