NO.1000 Ruan Mei | Honkai: Star Rail (Patreon)

People originally subscribed to me because my images were good. Looking back at my older work, I have to admit that in terms of NSFW intensity, the old models really did come out on top. That model was also easy to use , even a casual, simple prompt would usually give you something decent. It was the model I used for the longest time.

But Illustrious model had a lot of problems too. It couldn't control body type well; the waist would sometimes come out unnaturally long. It couldn't recreate character outfits very faithfully, and the details weren't there — complicated costumes were a nightmare (Ruan Mei, for example). Backgrounds were extremely simple and hard to control. Intelligence is very limited, and it doesn't understand a lot of concepts. Fingers and toes were a mess. It would also generate extra moles. Working on characters who actually had moles was the worst part of using Illustrious, because it would suddenly cover them in moles, and I'd have to sit in PS and click them off one by one. Hands usually needed to be redrawn and patched up, image by image. The workload was quite high.

Compared to now, though, those days were so much easier. I had more subscribers, more money, and I could take a ton of commissions. At my peak I was uploading five posts in a single day. But it got boring. The posts I put out aren't just for you — they're for me too. Honestly, I was tired of looking at illustrations from the old model. So even if subscriptions drop, I still want to work on things I actually find interesting. Right now I'm studying video. When AI goes further, I might make games too.

Doing animation does cut into how many images I can put out. Each post now only has around 40 CGs, but the quality is better (character consistency, scene consistency, story continuity, better costume detail, better backgrounds) Illustration resolution is still a bit lower than before, but in later posts I'll bump it up to 2K.

This is my 1,000th post, and I'm glad it's Ruan Mei, one of my favorite characters.

A few big issues with the videos right now:

The character's lips still sometimes drift toward a live-action look and come out too red. I'll try to tone that down going forward.

The sound effects still aren't great. I don't have a really good solution for that yet, but I'll keep trying to improve them.