Special | Image quality upgrade (Patreon)

Don't worry, I haven't disappeared! Even though I've been a bit quiet over the last few weeks, I haven't been idle. After a very long time, I've finally managed to pull off a major upgrade—possibly the biggest one yet—when it comes to my image quality.

I finally took the leap, said goodbye to my old Pony-based model, and spent countless hours working on switching over to Illustrious. The reason this took so long was that I had to find a way to preserve my look. My original plan...simply gathering the Illustrious versions of the base models I used before and putting together an identical merge...failed miserably, forcing me to start completely from scratch. So, I spent ages looking at different models and mixing them over and over until I felt I was finally getting the proportions and cuteness just right. I could go on forever about everything that went wrong, but I'll spare you the details!

What’s New?Since Illustrious is built on a more modern architecture than Pony, it understands and interprets natural language and prompts significantly better. Pony was much more rigid in its prompt comprehension, which required a lot of workaround tricks on my end. My new custom model is far more versatile when it comes to handling object and environmental interactions, camera angles, fine details, lighting, proportional descriptions, and facial expressions.

I always struggled with skin softness in particular and was never quite happy with the squishiness of my characters. The stomach area was a huge issue because Pony isn’t well trained on generating a slightly chubby lower belly. Now, I can fine tune this much better to fit each individual character. SKin folds and the way booba and thighs squeezes out of tight clothes also look much more organic. On top of that, my new merch is far more detailed, sharp, and clean. I definitely haven't recreated 100% of my old style just yet, but I'll keep tweaking and experimenting to improve it even further.The last pic of Jade sitting on a tree branch is actually a pic I wanted to do forever, but I couldn't get it to work on my old model. It's the very first one I felt was good enough to finish and share. Even though I have quite improved during the testing phase while creating the other pics...which is why Jade looks a bit different in the other one.

For these test images, I picked a wide variety of scenarios to see how the model handles the themes that matter most. I'm really excited to get to work on the new sets and to see what cool new stuff I can do with it.

Thank you very much for your patience everyone! 🙏