A fan of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker has taken advantage of AI to recreate a realistic version of one of the game’s islands. While this piece is a bit more over the top, digital fan art inspired by this much-loved series is nothing new.
Wind Waker was, in many ways, a significant departure from the traditional formula of Legend of Zelda. While previous and later titles like Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess tried to get closer to realistic visuals by making use of more basic art styles, Wind Waker took a turn in the opposite direction with its graphics and bright color palette. More than any Zelda game before or since, Wind Waker focused on maritime exploration, with players traveling from island to island in The Kind of Red Lions, a sentient sailing ship. Thanks to this nautical backbone, the game features various land masses, both large and small, that players can investigate at will.
Even though Wind Waker stands out from other games Zelda, fans of the franchise make unique fan arts inspired by him. And one of them features an image of an Outer Island realistic on the Zelda subreddit. Although the image looks like a photograph, it is actually computer generated using NVIDIA’s Gaugan Neural Network, a artificial intelligence which is used to create realistic images from references. Using the original design of the island from Wind Waker, Datee27 has been able to create this image.
The image is strange considering the art style of Wind Waker. Even for its time, the game featured very cartoony visuals, so a photorealistic rendering of one of its locations is quite a juxtaposition. Still, the image is sure to please The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and AI enthusiasts alike, and it will be interesting to see if more game locations are reconstructed through this AI neural network.