Plate II · Image generation
PixelForge
Batch image work on the same cards, with the styles kept as house recipes rather than as a text box the customer has to fight.
In service https://wardrobegonewild.com
PixelForge makes images in quantity. It runs on the same plant as the document reader, which means a job of five hundred images costs what the power costs and not what a rented card costs.
The public face of it is a consumer site. Behind that site the work is plain: a queue, a fleet of render lanes, a set of style recipes held as multipliers in a database rather than as prose in a prompt box, and a delivery path that puts the finished file on a content network instead of through our own machines.
What it does well
- Volume. The unit of work is a batch, not a picture.
- Consistency. A house style is a stored recipe with a fixed strength. The same recipe next month produces the same treatment.
- Identity. A subject can be carried from one photograph into a new scene by editing the photograph itself, one change at a time, rather than by describing the subject in words and hoping.
The specification
- Lanes: several render tiers, from a fast draft lane to a full-resolution lane, chosen per job.
- Delivery: private object storage with signed cookies, served from the edge, so an image is fetched from the nearest city rather than from Washington State.
- Retention: rendered files expire on a fixed schedule; nothing is kept because it might be useful later.