Among the dozens of ideas that GenAI has enabled me to do is bring ancient sculptures back to life. Talking about taking notes of ideas that you thought were impossible, huh? This is a new era of creativity. Period. I no longer need to wait for another historical epic from Ridley Scott to take a better glimpse into the fascinating worlds from the past, I can create one on my own. Great. With these powerful tools, I can even bring books back to life, empowering fantasy, and increasing curiosity. You see, it is even impossible for me to focus on the subject of the blog in the fifth sentence of the article without falling into the pits of unlimited fantasies. Human hallucination, inherited by AI?
I’m on record as having tried this before. You can watch my Carthaginian—Hannibal AI Movie Concept Animatic on YouTube, which features two shots derived from the iconic sculpture of Hannibal Barca of Carthage (Spoilers: my favorite historical figure). The results were amazing for the time but unsatisfactory. These shots took a lot of iterations to produce, and they are still not as realistic as I would have liked.
In fact, my second first prompt attempt on MidJourney was aimed at bringing back the “dying Gaul” sculpture to real-life colors. It was done on MidJourney 6.0. Naively, I hoped that AI would know the sculpture and retexture it into life. From the first results, I understood that this is pointless. I would need a more powerful tool to achieve that.
I’m sure that it was possible for a while now with ComfyUI or other rather advanced AI tools, but the recently released MidJourney Editor was perfect for it. In this guide, I’ll bring back to life my second favorite historical figure – Pyhrrus of Epirus.
1. Get the Image
First, you need a picture of the sculpture. If it is a small resolution one, it might be a good idea to upscale with one of the many AI upscalers. There are countless tools to achieve this, personally, I use the Freepik AI toolset for these matters.
2. Upload & Retexture on MidJourney Editor
Second, go to the web version of MidJourney and find the editor hidden on the left sidebar of the SaaS website.
Note: this is only possible via the web version of MidJourney. Unfortunately, you can’t access these powerful tools via Discord.
You can upload the image or edit it from the URL, then choose retexture mode at the top left of the screen, enter your prompt, and watch the magic happen.
Obviously, it already looks great but I made a few iterations to get the result closer to what I could use. Another issue is that the image lacks historical accuracy–he looks more like a scout than an actual soldier, not even to mention a King General. So, let’s give Pyhrrus the armor he deserves.
In the famous sculpture of the Epirian King is shown with a helmet for a reason – Pyhrrus hardly rested between skirmishes. While it has some typical characteristics of the time, for practical reasons the sculpture doesn’t show all the majesty of the type of a King he was. It is very likely the helmet had a cresta at least.
The results are quite fascinating. I don’t think that Pyhrrus’s army chose red as their color, but I have no idea what it must have been. MidJourney chose this color probably because of a much bigger source of imagery of Roman soldiers than any other people from Antiquity, and probably all the history except for modern times.
3. Optional: Upscale the Image
Depending on your needs, you might want to upscale the image, or more importantly add some details. I found it essential for image-to-video AI generation, but will probably will prove to be crucial for any other case other than sharing it on social media.
Again, there are plenty of AI image upscalers but my choice is Freepik AI.
4. Optional: Reiterate with MidJourney
You can use an image as a character reference (–cref) for different scenes with real-life Pyhrrus of Epirus.
As you can see this technique is very powerful and could be used to produce endless scenes with character consistency. You can try it yourself with the prompt below!
Cinematic still of King General with a helmet leading a Hellenic army in a fierce battlefield, he hold a spear and shield, war elephant behind him, Antique buildings in the background on a hill, action, dynamic composition, dutch angle, long shot, dramatic scene, epic movie, beautiful colors, establishing shot, Ridley Scott style --cref https://s.mj.run/1-vJHiTj4ZY --cw 50 --ar 16:9Pro tip: To maximize the character consistency use an image of your character from at least four different angles.
5. Optional: Animate with your Favorite AI Video Generator
I used MidJourney to change aspect ratio to 16:9 and Hailuo AI to animate the scene. It really shows the real abilities of this effective combination of powerful AI tools.
Use Cases
I see two different directions for the actual application of this.
Educational
Visuals like this can bring actual historical figures back to life. As a result, making the often boring traditional historical material less attractive than it should be. Also, historians are the only ones who could engineer a prompt that would “actually” make these figures realistic because neither I, or AI, know what exactly Pyrhhus, or any historical figure, could have worn at that time of history.
Commercial
I imagine, this approach could help pick more accurate actors for historical movies. It should be possible to use generated image to search your actor database for the best matches.