I took a squiggle to stained glass made by myself, so it can be done from a sketch in GIMP if the programs aren’t doing it.
2 Likes
I’ve been playing around with MJ’s alpha to generate on their website instead of Discord.
A lot of the features have already been migrated.
Cool things - you can drag and drop images right from the archive page (where all your generations live) and easily pick if you’re using the image as a style reference or a character reference.
There are folders and filters to help find past images. Also it’s easy to hide the images I don’t like so I don’t have to keep encountering the ones that don’t come out.
Cons? I keep accidentally typing into the “imagine” field instead of the search box and keep wasting credits. 
I can’t seem to find the credit balance anywhere on the site. I had to check it on Discord. Unsurprisingly, I barely have any left.
I got lost down a couple of rabbit holes and used up almost all of them in a few days.
#1
I was playing around with the text feature, wondering if I could create a cool title. It takes a lot of tries. Spelling is not MJ’s strong suit. But it gets better with variations.
Here are a few cool ones.
Overall not bad, cool effects are possible, but they would need some retouching to be more than just cool.
#2
I was testing the new character reference feature that MJ just rolled out.
It works but not always the way I’d like it to.
It’s good at creating slight variations of an existing image with less variation to the face, but I found that when trying to vary expression or the mood or the style, it gave me very grotesque results.
I experimented with my vampire, Lailoken. When created from a prompt, his face always comes out broody and serious. This is the most relaxed I was able to get out of him.
But he’s a fun guy, so I wanted to give him more light-hearted expression.
It took A LOT of tries to finally arrive at something. Even when using the new character reference feature, it changed his face too much when putting a smile on him. It drove me crazy.
Thankfully, I’m stubborn.
This is my ancient bloodsucker dancing in a night club (a scene in this book).
Kinda too shiny but I like it anyway.
Plus I played around with blood because there are several bloody scenes in this book.
MJ struggled to paint the blood on him the way I wanted it. And fangs are even harder to paint. Mentioning fangs usually results in grotesque results.
TW: this one's bloody
Finally put a nice set of fangs on him.
Here’s Lailoken passed out on drunk blood. He’s supposed to be more bloody than this but MJ is consistently bad at that. It’s better at drawing wounds on his face instead of blood splatter no matter how many ways I try to direct it.
A con of the new features is that it’s difficult to mix and match. So if I want to use one image for character reference and another for style reference, the results are never what I want. I haven’t played around with weights yet so perhaps changing the weight of each would help. So far I’ve had better results using one image plus a prompt.
V5.2 was a bit better at blending images. It was more creative, I guess. V6 is trying hard to be more accurate, and it is, but getting the more creative results takes a lot more tries.
Here’s a live oak, as they are fairly creepy looking on their own:
It gives me some ideas of how to “fix” the letters.
(The Angel Oak on Johns Island, South Carolina. Source: Idawriter, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Yeah. I’ve seen that tree. It’s pretty fascinating how all oaks grow “up” and this one was like, what if I grew sideways instead?
There’s 2 kinds of trees that have this mutation. Down here, it’s due to them surviving the hurricanes.
1 Like
I found a SDXL Checkpoint that creates Japanese PVC figurine styled images of characters. Still doesn’t get the hands right though.
^Dov’s acquired the 300 Spartan eight-pack.
^Krista’s teddy should be her height but SDXL doesn’t understand that.
^The reason why Freyja’s hugs require health insurance.
1 Like
How is everyone doing?
I’ve been happily creating with Midjourney. It’s gotten really good at creating characters with their new character reference feature. It’s easier to stay consistent.
However, it’s still difficult to create images that call for two characters, especially if those characters don’t follow stereotypical standards. So when my woman has short hair and the man has long hair - no AI can handle that confusing concept.
If you’re curious about the process of creating complex images, here we go.
I’ve done this type of post before but the models have changed so much. Let’s play again.
Multi-character images
I set out on a task of creating a new book cover for my vampire urban fantasy that would include both Lailoken (the vampire) and Josie (the hunter). The plan is to create the concept image, then draw that and try to create something that’s cover-usable. (I plan to monetize this story in the future so I’ll need a commercial cover eventually)
I’m able to create both characters individually with no problem. I have hundreds of awesome images. Here are a couple of the recent ones.
She’s cover ready 
A variation on the vampire night club scene.
But both in one image? That’s a huge challenge. And I can’t just create them separately then mash them together in post because the lighting is all wrong (see what it looks like lower down this post), and unfortunately the prompts for the two characters never create the same style. If I try to change the style of one to match the other, the character changes too much or things get weird fast. It’s really annoying.
To create an image that would have both characters, I tried using character references of both but that doesn’t work at all. It ignores the prompt and mashes them together into one person.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually a really cool result, but not what I wanted.
For example, this accidental mashup.
I call this the femme Lailoken
Or this one
I totally imagine Lailoken evolving into a party boy once he gets used to the modern times so this image is officially future canon in my head.
I tried using an image of one of them and adding the other with Vary Region (inpainting) and using a character reference. None of those came out well enough. Here is the most interesting result of that and it’s the only result like that. I couldn’t even recreate this concept if I tried.
It’s cool but not usable for a cover.
I tried so many times that I used up all my credits. I created lots of awesome images in the process. If I was less picky about what I wanted, lots of them would have been enough.
Here are my favorite rejects.
Cool but not it
So dramatic
I love the mood of this one. It’s so cute.
I liked this one and I tried to change her hair SO MANY times with Vary Region. No matter what I did, it absolutely refused to make her hair shorter.
Actually, while writing this and uploading all those cool images, I had a moment of, Did I give up too soon? Should I try again? And I couldn’t drop it (this whole thread wouldn’t exist if I ever knew when to drop it), so I purchased more credits and I’m trying to vary region on one of the above images to see if I can make something usable. I’ll update if I succeed at last.
Anyway, within that (apparently brief) period when I had no credits, I reached out for some old tools.
1. Hero Forge.
I created Lailoken and Josie. Say hi.
Putting them in these positions was quite a lot of work, but in other news, I had absolutely missed the news that Hero Forge added so many new features. It’s even easier now to customize facial features. I love it.
And I love the robes I was able to put on him. I’m actually wondering if I should change the in-book description to match this.
I’m also wondering what it would look like if I tried to draw the figurine. Would it come out grotesque or cool? I need to try to see what happens.
And so this creation led to #2. Checking out SD again.
2. Wombo Dream
I haven’t used Wombo in a long time. It hasn’t changed much. They added some new presets but overall, it’s the same. And that’s a good thing.
What I’ve always liked about Wombo that it did much better than any other tool I’ve used is to use reference images.
I feed the image into it to show it what I want structurally, right?
In the first series of attempts, I tried to mash up two MJ images that I posted above. I used Krita to create this thing. By itself it’s not good because the lighting, colors, etc, don’t match, but it does enough to tell Wombo what type of characters I want.
By the way, feeding this image to MJ produces horrendous results. lol. MJ is not good at this process at all.
Here is the best I was able to get out of it. It’s not bad but the coloration is getting on my nerves. Perhaps I should have tried to do something about it in Krita. Oh, well.
Then I tried to use Hero Forge images.
They’re actually not bad.
Anyway, I’m going to keep playing around, but overall, I think I’ve created plenty of images to choose from. I have a something to draw now. Something here should be usable, right?
Do you have a favorite?
1 Like
Is there an Ent in the background doing a ‘wet willy’ (left ear)?
1 Like
Omg, I didn’t notice that one. Ouch.
1 Like
I have 2 minutes left from the extra credits I bought (refilled twice because I was onto something) which probably isn’t even enough for one generation, but after lots of experimentation, I finally created something.
There are some iffy details in this image that I would have to work on in Krita if I wanted to use this for a temporary cover image, but structurally, it’s good.
I’m thinking to hold off on editing this image yet because…
I started drawing one of the earlier rejected images. We’ll see what comes of it. If it comes out good enough for a cover, I might use that.
If not, I’ll try to draw this one instead. If I used this new one for a temporary cover, then I’d be hesitant to draw it later just in case someone wanted to bring it up in the future, compare them side by side and point out similarities. I’d rather not become the next target for the anti-ai crowd that would dox me just because I happen to use AI in my creative process even if the finished artwork is hand drawn.
It’s interesting that most of the ai hate I’m seeing is from people who aren’t artists. Creative professionals actually making money from their creative endeavors are either already using AI to experiment with concepts or don’t use it and ignore the hype, knowing well that AI can’t do what they do and never will (at least, not in the near future).
At least, that’s the vibes I’m getting.
Unfortunately, those artists aren’t willing to take a stand because the hate is not worth it. I suppose I do the same as this is the only space where I openly talk about it. I’m a nobody. I don’t want to become a hated somebody. The end result is what matters to me. It’s propelling me into becoming a better artist. It’s like having a mentor that’s teaching me how to learn from the masters. For $10+ a month.
I mean, if you’d told me a year ago that I was capable of drawing like this with the most unforgiving tool available (markers), I wouldn’t have believed you.
1 Like
Some interesting developments in AI (or AI assisted) 3D image generation.
Maybe by next year there will be 3D AI generators with similar texture quality / resolution to Daz 3D’s Genesis 8.1 models.
1 Like
@TheTigerWriter @NotARussianBot
Curiosity got the better of me, again. Decided to experiment with Stable Diffusion XL to see what the software thought a cyberpunk dragon might look like.
3 Likes
So cool! I need to redraw them!
2 Likes
I was wondering if it was time to retire this thread but honestly, it’s the only place to freely talk about this stuff. Like a bloodsucker, it won’t die.
I’m still using Midjourney. Their alpha site has become my primary playground. It’s really convenient with how you can drag images around. Character references are a big help to ensure consistency. The drawback is that it works only with images created with V6. Results aren’t that good when trying to use images from V5.x, which means that I have to recreate the perfect character first before using them for a reference.
My current challenge is to create a new book cover. MJ is an excellent tool to experiment with design concepts to figure out what kind of a cover I want.
The plan is to generate it, then draw it, combine it all in Krita and end up with something cool.
This process worked well for the vampire book. I hope to be able to repeat it for my paranormal book too.
This cover has proven to be very tricky. This isn’t an easy book to pitch.
Here are some cool cover designs MJ gave me (I’m not using any of these).
And here’s a set from using the describe feature on published books I took photos of when looking for inspiration. Ignore the nonsensical text. Aren’t these cool? (also not using any of these, it was just an experiment of styles)
2 Likes
This thread…
2 Likes
Good read. In short, copyright office is pushing congress for new laws protecting everyone (not just celebrities and politicians) against digital replicas (deep fakes).
It’s pretty ridiculous that no such law exists yet.
1 Like
They might be a tad late, considering how good the new image and animation generation AI software is (even the free / open source software), and how good it could be given another year of development.
Some current examples:
I’m curious to know, what happens (legally) when AI generates an image or short clip and one of the featured characters looks like a real person (e.g. celebrity), however that person was not referenced in the prompt or sourced in the AI’s training data (or the training data is completely synthetic). The AI just happens to be really good at its assigned tasks…One example, Google’s AI won a silver medal at the Olympics equivalent international math competition in July this year…
At least the world’s VIPs are safe from my butter fingers. I remain unable to produce photo-realistic character images in SDXL (A1111). Whenever I achieve passable skin textures the character’s face remains flat (like they’re wearing an inch of makeup), or the image is so over-saturated some might think I opened the image in Photoshop, selected the ‘RAW Filters’ window, and bounced my noggin along the keyboard.
Yet other image prompting enthusiasts are having far more success than I am. Check out the r/midjourney, r/aiart, r/stablediffusion, and the Civitai image galleries.
Update: And now there’s a new AI image generation software called Flux, which is all I know about it.
1 Like
Looks like Flux is the best option for photo-realistic image generation, and its free and open-source. Yay. However, the full version of Flux requires at least 20GB of video memory (GPU RAM) to run efficiently, and a user knowledge of Comfy UI. Not so yay.
Oh, R.I.P. / Z"L to the photo-stock industry, if it was not already rendered past-tense by supply saturation.
Update: Just looked at the Flux checkpoints listed on Civitai. Smallest checkpoint is 22GB. Guess I’ll stay with SDXL for the moment.
2 Likes
To keep this thread active, here are some recent SDXL character images.
The popularity of Flux continues to grow, and the development of SDXL A1111 appears to have stalled, so I may have to switch to Flux-lite to continue AI image generation experiments…or finally find a winning lotto ticket and acquire a PC system able to run the full +20GB Flux Checkpoints…
Relevant video.
2 Likes
