Creating visual representations of character with GAN, woot.

So I just discovered Artbreeder.com and set about making a Piper. Prior to this, I was only able to:

a) draw Piper (with pen in the many, many SVT books I defaced)

b) make silly computer art with Microsoft Paint and modified clipart from Corel software (it was the late 90s/early 00s)

c) use Illustrator to make James Mathewuse-esque cover illustrations that included Piper (in which I would take an illustration of another character looking sly or angry from the cover of an SVT book, and modify it to be Piper), and 

d) collect various photos on Pinterest for inspiration.

But now, I can MAKE PEOPLE. As in, computer-generated realistic portraits. These people don't exist, but they sure look like they do (or at least, just their head). I love GAN (Generalized Adversarial Network - that's what the machine learning/AI is called that can generate these portraits). So I set about making representations of the twins that matched the cover illustrations of SVT/ how I imagined them. Ditto for Steven. And Piper, and Tobias...

Naturally I got too involved making Piper. She's my red-headed witch honey. (Yeah I know there are OODLES of red-haired witches already in popular culture, but dammit, I invented her in 1994 and there isn't a TV/movie version of Sweet Valley Twins. Sweet Valley High, yeah, with Todd and Bruce looking 30 [well, much like the book cover illustrations, haha] and there definitely wasn't a horror parody of Sweet Valley Twins. So first she exists here in Sweet Valley [Saccharin Valley] where everyone's suspiciously WHITE and whatnot. And where there were no witches, previously. Then when she's in her own story, she's hopefully slightly different than all those other red-headed witch characters.)

Here's some Pipers.

I like the first and last ones; I just need to take it into Photoshop (which is only on my old Macbook, grrr**) and make her eyes greener and add Goth earrings and her spiked choker. Then I could do the witchy version from The Babysitter (glowing yellow eyes and witchy teeth - and the shiny silver triangle on her forehead that I stole from The Headless Cupid*). But demon witch Piper will be trickier. I have been trying to render that in Illustrator, it never looked quite right. If I find a photo of proper demonic prosthetic makeup I can maybe crossbreed it with this. Or, play around with Blender?? TurboSquid?? I don't know; I'm old. One of them is super expensive. I think Zbrush. or Maya. Blender is free but then you subscribe to their cloud. Unless I'm confusing that with something else. 3D rendering would be awesome; I don't necessarily need animation. Unless I want to make movies of my stories. How would I even do that (also, probably still worry about copyright infringement even tho it's supposed to be horror-parody). 

Yeah, now I'm trying to learn Blender. You can get 3D models (your "base mesh") for free online, and take them into Blender and tweak them. But I want to take my 2D portraits from Artbreeder and make them 3D in Blender, and don't know how.

*occasionally I get embarrassed by that part and want to take it out, but it's kind of a nod to by 15-year-old self.

**I just found GIMP which I can use instead, woot