NVIDIA Canvas
AI-powered painting to revolutionise your art
NVIDIA Canvas is an advanced application that takes your broad digital painting brushstrokes and turns them into highly detailed backgrounds with incredible detail.
• Concept artists can rapidly explore new ideas
• Designers can quickly draft backdrops and environments for their buildings
• Creators can rapidly paint a landscape rather than searching hours for the perfect stock photo
NVIDIA Canvas is designed to supplement your existing workflows - enabling you to rapidly iterate and visualise new landscapes and environments.
It works by taking the basic shapes and lines you make, to generate skies and land features from a range of realistic features including grass, trees, flowers, sand, water and clouds. It features nine styles that modify the look and feel of a painting and 20 different materials such as river, stone and mountains, so you can paint on different layers to keep elements separate - you start from a blank canvas or build on one of the sample scenes.
If you don’t like what you see, you can simply swap a material - change the snow to grass, and watch as the entire image changes from a winter wonderland to a tropical paradise - the creative possibilities are endless. Once you’re happy with your creation NVIDIA Canvas then allows you to import your work into Adobe Photoshop so you can continue to refine it or combine it with other artwork.
NVIDIA Canvas in action
The Scan team comprises talented individual engineers, musicians and artists, who were keen to try out Canvas for themselves. We commissioned the artist Carol Holmes to paint a dragon flying over a lake using Canvas in generate the background, which can you can see the results of below from rough sketch on the left, four AI-generated iterations in the middle and the final painting on the right.
You can see more of Carol Holmes’ art and get in touch with her on Instagram.
How NVIDIA Canvas works
Canvas uses a Generative Adversarial Network or GAN to turn a rough painting of a segmentation map into a realistic landscape image - it is powered by the Tensor cores found in NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Over five million photographs of landscapes were used to train the network using a NVIDIA DGX AI appliance, but you don’t need any knowledge about AI or neural networks to use NVIDIA Canvas - it has been designed as an artist-first application. The tool also allows artists to use style filters, changing a generated image to adopt the style of a particular painter. NVIDIA Canvas isn’t just stitching together pieces of other images, or cutting and pasting textures, but creating brand new images, just like an artist would.
System Requirements for NVIDIA Canvas
Canvas uses a Generative Adversarial Network or GAN to turn a rough painting of a segmentation map into a realistic landscape image - it is powered by the Tensor cores found in NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Over five million photographs of landscapes were used to train the network using a NVIDIA DGX AI appliance, but you don’t need any knowledge about AI or neural networks to use NVIDIA Canvas - it has been designed as an artist-first application. The tool also allows artists to use style filters, changing a generated image to adopt the style of a particular painter. NVIDIA Canvas isn’t just stitching together pieces of other images, or cutting and pasting textures, but creating brand new images, just like an artist would.
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX, NVIDIA RTX or TITAN RTX GPU |
| Storage drive | SSD |
| OS | Windows 10 or later |
| Driver | 520 or later for GeForce RTX 40 Series, 471.68 or later for all other GPUs |
| User Guide | https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/user-guide/ |