RPG AI Selfie does not train or host its own image models. Every portrait, party shot and animation you make here is rendered through a generative ai api — the hosted image and video service at GenerativeAIAPI.com. This page explains what that means, what happens to your selfie while a portrait is being made, and why we build on someone else's inference instead of our own GPUs.
What is a generative AI API?
A generative AI API is a web endpoint you send a prompt to and get back a generated image or video. Instead of installing model weights, renting graphics cards and keeping a queue alive, you make one HTTP request with a model name and a prompt, and the service does the rest.
GenerativeAIAPI.com is one of these. It exposes image models, video models and vision (tagging and captioning) models behind a single REST endpoint, with each model priced in credits so the cost of a render is known before it runs. Failed jobs are refunded automatically, and finished results are stored and returned as signed links.
How does RPG AI Selfie use one?
Our app handles the parts a player sees: choosing a race and class, uploading a selfie, assembling the prompt, tracking gold, storing your gallery. When it is time to actually make a picture, we hand a model slug, a prompt and your reference photo to the API and wait for the job to come back.
That means the fantasy-portrait craft lives here — the prompt templates, the reference handling, the party consistency rules — while the raw rendering lives there. If you want the visitor-facing version of that split, see how it works.
What happens between uploading a selfie and getting a portrait?
- You pick a race, class and style in the builder, and upload a photo.
- We build a prompt from your choices and the template for that race and class combination.
- We create a generation job on the API with your photo as a reference image.
- We poll that job until it finishes, then copy the result into your own private storage.
- The finished portrait appears in your gallery, ready to download, animate, edit or print.
Larger work — party portraits, animations, character sheets — is the same loop with a different model and a different cost. The full list of what you can make is on the features page.
Why use a hosted API instead of running the models ourselves?
Three reasons, in order of how much they matter to us:
- Model churn. The best image model changes every few months. Going through an API means switching is a configuration change, not a migration.
- Capacity. Traffic here is spiky — a weekend campaign push can be ten times a Tuesday. Renting inference per job beats keeping idle graphics cards warm.
- Failure handling. When a render fails on their side, the credits come back automatically, which is what lets us refund your gold when a job dies.
The trade-off is honest: we depend on an outside service for the single most important thing the product does. We accept that because the alternative is spending our time on infrastructure rather than on making portraits look like you.
What does this mean for the speed, cost and quality of your portraits?
Every model on the API has its own credit price and typical render time, from a couple of seconds for a quick draft to a few minutes for video. Our gold prices are set from those underlying costs, which is why a still portrait costs less than an animation, and why a party shot of six people costs more than a single hero.
When we move to a faster or better model, that pricing is what changes first. You can see the current gold packs and what each action costs on our pricing page.
How is your photo handled along the way?
Your selfie is uploaded to our own private storage, and a temporary reference to it is passed to the API for the duration of the render. Finished images are copied back into your private storage rather than left on a third-party link.
If you never buy anything and never subscribe, we delete your selfie and your free preview portrait after 30 days, with a warning email first. Subscribers keep their images stored for as long as the subscription is active. What you generate is yours — for personal use, at your table, or printed on a shirt.