Midjourney images on Instagram for Magnum Thrax

The Technowitch at The Nexus, where nanite swarms have saturated the rock, and can be called forth with the proper command node implant. The wings, the cubes, the hair, the head, the energy ball were all added in ProCreate

I've been continuing to bring to life Magnum Thrax in Instagram (@magnumthrax), using Midjourney renderings. 

Over the last couple of months, Midjourney has improved by leaps and bounds. On release, it couldn't do wheels. Faces were asymmetrical and disturbing looking. Hands and feet were nonexistent. Now, they're often warped, but they're there. You can get wheels, tracks, recognizable vehicle shapes. Things seem to have more structure than they did before, using the Remaster button (the initial version adds lovely texture and an artistic flare that is sometimes absent in remaster, which can sometimes be stripped down and simplified to the point of looking cartoonish. But that's gotten much, much better as well...).

It's astonishing. 

I can only imagine how good it will be in a year, or ten years. 

This is really going to change things, although I wonder how it will wash out legally, as Midjourney uses millions of photos to construct its images.

For now, I'm having a lot of fun. Midjourney's kind of addictive, and once you learn to roll with its limitations, you can produce a lot of fabulous imagery.

Most of the stuff I've generated is from the history of the Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom world, the satirical sci-fi adventure novel I wrote in The Before Time. =

A technowitch tending the deep underground cryocrypts. Much of the arms and hands were added in post.

A gigantic 100,000 ton pirate megacrawler which terrorized the Arizona Sun Corridor for centuries after The Fall. It was armed to the teeth and powered by a fusion stack fuelled by... water, meaning it could keep going indefinitely, without access to fossil fuels. On the plus side (for its potential victims), the crawler was terribly slow and you could literally see it coming miles away. In the image above, you can see a vertical arcology they're about to loot. 

Priests of the infamous Cocainola Cola Cult at a formal soda blessing ceremony. They used dark tech to preserve their flesh long before it's Best Before Date. The gruesome faces were detailed in post.

Team Thrax's glorious Pink Tank from the short story, Future Fossil. Note the roughness of the rendering, which is typical of Midjourney early after release. The tank commander was collaged in from another rendering, and the barrel 'photoshopped'.

Emergency tactical response team assembles outside New York City during one of the bionitic zombie outbreaks that occurred before even The First Apocalypse

Wait till you see what's to come.

If you can't, find more images right now over on Instagram @magnumthrax. 

These images were all made with Midjourney (and some subsequent image fiddling in ProCreate... some a considerable amount of editing, some hardly any).