Had a choice between two AI art tools for my fence design portfolio - picked the one that still let me tweak the linework by hand

Went with the less polished program that kept my manual control over every wire shape and shadow, and my last 3 clients said the final prints looked way more natural than the fully automated versions they'd seen from other contractors.

3 comments

3 Comments

wyatt_green311mo ago

Called it. People are out here letting robots draw their fences and wondering why everything looks like it was stamped out of a plastic mold. Bet those automated tools would have made your chicken wire look like a QR code. Something satisfying about knowing a human actually cared enough to adjust a shadow instead of letting an algorithm guess. The whole point of hand-done work is you can see the tiny differences. That's what makes it look real. Computers make everything too perfect and then you end up with fencing that looks like a video game background. Glad you stuck with the program that doesn't try to think for you.

kai_butler831mo agoMost Upvoted

Switched to manual shading on my last fencing project after the auto tool kept making these weird repeating shadow patterns that looked like a printed wallpaper. Spent an extra hour just nudging the opacity and angles on each section until it matched the reference photo I took at my dad's farm. The client actually asked if I had gone out and shot new reference material because it looked so natural.

margaret3041mo ago

Wyatt, I'm looking at this thread and I have to wonder - are we really getting worked up over fence drawing software? I mean, it's a tool for making pictures of chicken wire, not a life or death decision. Some folks like the handmade look, some people just want a quick result for their design project. Neither one is wrong. The program I use still lets me tweak shadows by hand when I want to, but it also saves me time on the boring parts. At the end of the day, what matters is whether the fence in the picture does what you need it to do, not whether a human or a robot drew each little wire.