AI ART: How to get started with Stable Diffusion (Patreon)

A guide on how to get started! If you're a supporter I recommend reading my previous two posts on the subject to understand the basic concept of how prompts work. For visitors, I recommend looking that up first (or subscribing!). There's also a guide by JaxZoa about stuff like this on the hub in the free Guides section, I got into it from him: "Create Hentai with VAM", it covers a lot of stuff.

I started playing with this myself only recently so I'm no expert. But I did figure out a few things and wanted to share them with you guys because it's incredibly simple to use and it's a revolutionary technology that's going to disrupt a lot of things and is very fun. Some of you might find it very useful in your day to day lives too.

It's a very simple download,click,done install & a simple UI, don't get intimidated by the mountain of text!

WHAT IS STABLE DIFFUSION

You've probably seen a lot of news about AI art this year. SD was first released this August, made a very big splash, and keeps making them ever since. There's a lot of drama around it concerning artists since it's able to imitate painting/drawing/art styles and turn any image in that style in seconds. (Guardian article from last month)

Long story short, it's an AI that learns how images work and what's in them, and based on that knowledge it starts making its own images. There's a virtually infinite variety to them. You could ask it to do armors, for example, if you'd check 1000 images per day it would take you 6 followed by 16 zeros years to see them all. The Sun will die out in 5 followed by 9 zeros for reference. The AI can actually make much more but the number is an imposed limitation for computing purposes.

PHOTOREALISM

People so far mostly used it for 3d or 2d stuff, you can see what some people are doing & sharing at the StableDiffusion subreddit. But since recently it's possible to go for images that look convincingly realistic.

This is going to be huge next year but also, as you can imagine, it's going to be a very controversial subject since the AI can create many sorts of disturbing images and can be used, and is used for bad things. There are attempts to limit it (example Verge article from last week) but it's a bit of a genie in a bottle situation and the genie is already out.

USE IT WITH CAUTION

Since we're about VAM here and that's deep into the adult content territory, I urge you to use it responsibly and with caution so that you don't get in trouble: 

•  don't use it to fake photos of celebs or things like that; it can make trillions of hot babes that are completely yours, you can even sell the photos
• don't use it for illegal stuff or extreme stuff that might be disturbing and get you in trouble
•  use words like "woman" not "girl" when building images, add words like "mature" to positive prompts and words like "child" to the negative prompts to avoid having the AI go in that direction. Many VAM models around already look sketchy, especially with faces, with AI they might go in that direction if you're not careful Before going into photorealism I recommend playing just with 2d/3d stuff for a while until you figure out the process and are comfortable with it.

HOW TO INSTALL

 Go to https://github.com/cmdr2/stable-diffusion-ui and follow the steps there which are:

1. Click Download for Windows
2. Extract it somewhere and run Start Stable Diffusion UI.cmd Done!

It will install a bunch of geeky stuff but everything seems legit to me. Info about StableDiffusionUI:
- reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusionUI/
- discord: https://discord.com/invite/u9yhsFmEkB
- donations: https://ko-fi.com/cmdr2_stablediffusion_ui 

From there on when you'll open Start Stable Diffusion UI.cmd again: - it will open a command prompt window which does all the work - it will also open a tab in a browser to "http://localhost:9000/" which is the UI you'll use

Everything is local on your computer, it doesn't connect to web services or send data. To close it you just close the command prompt and the tab. It does automatically update when you run it which is a bit annoying.

TROUBLESHOOT 

I didn't have any problems installing but just in case there's this: https://github.com/cmdr2/stable-diffusion-ui/wiki/Troubleshooting 

If it looks like an image is not generating it might mean it got stuck and you have to reset it. You can close and restart just the command prompt, you can keep the tab open if you have stuff in it, you don't have to restart that too. I had that happening sometimes when the input image was too big (>1024px) or when I was trying to make a very large image..

SETTINGS AFTER INSTALLATION 

You run "Start Stable Diffusion UI.cmd" when you want to open it and it will open in a new browser tab. 

IMPORTANT: Go to settings and disable "Make Stable Diffusion available on your network", you very likely don't need that. It's for running it on servers and connecting to the UI from a different machine and it leaves a port open for that purpose which might be insecure. It makes all the server links at the bottom of settings be accessible from other devices to connect to the UI. After you turn it off you can close the command prompt and start it again to restart.

AI MODELS  

Models are .ckpt files that are sort of like vam addons. You put them in the folder models\stable-diffusion and when you start/restart it they'll appear in the Model dropdown. A model is a unique AI that does images in its own way based on what it was taught.

Some models also have a .pt file (or another ckpt file that has "vae" in the name)  that's like an after-effect correction to the images and appears in the Custom VAE dropdown in the UI. But very few do, you don't have to worry about it.

You should already have the default model installed:
- the default model installed is sd-v1-4-full-ema
- the default VAE installed is vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned 

You'll see "pruned" with models a lot. The term means it's an optimized cleaned-up version of the original and works the same but takes less space. 

You can download more models from here https://huggingface.co/models?other=stable-diffusion 

Hentai model that I used: Anything-V3.0.ckpt from here: 

• - https://huggingface.co/Linaqruf/anything-v3.0/blob/main/Anything-V3.0.ckpt goes in models\stable-diffusion 
• - https://huggingface.co/Linaqruf/anything-v3.0/blob/main/Anything-V3.0.vae.pt goes in models\vae 

Photorealistic model that I used: 

• https://huggingface.co/hassanblend/hassanblend1.4/blob/main/HassanBlend1.4.ckpt goes in models\stable-diffusion

After you add AI models you have to restart it and they'll appear in the dropdown.

UI EXPLAINED

- Prompt - words to help the AI go in that direction. you can find examples on reddit (r/StableDiffusion) or here https://prompthero.com/stable-diffusion-prompts. Also here are some very cool ones for the photorealistic one https://rentry.org/sdhassan#merged-models . For more general stuff these are quite good too https://github.com/Dalabad/stable-diffusion-prompt-templates . You just copy paste those and add the custom stuff to it like "warrior woman in black shiny armor with a red cape sitting in a forest" + copy paste one of those examples to get better quality or certain effects/styles

- Negative Prompt - things you don't want it to do;  I usually copy paste this for photorealistic stuff, but you might want to scale it down and take inspirations from prompts you find online from example photos you like. I copied a lot of them and this likely is overkill but works fine for me so far:

blurry, art, painting, rendering, drawing, sketch, child, children, anime, cartoon, penis, fake, drawing, illustration, boring, 3d render, long neck, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, ((monochrome)), ((poorly drawn hands)), 3DCG, cgstation, red eyes, multiple subjects, extra heads, close up, man asian, text ,watermarks, logo, airbrush, amputee, anime, anime eyes, anorexic, bad anatomy, bad eyes, bad proportions, bad proportions , blind, blur, blurry, blurry, cartoon, censored, character design, cloned face, closeup, closeup, cropped, cropped, cross eyed, day, dead eyes, deformed, disfigured, duplicate, error, extra arms, extra fingers, extra legs, extra limbs, fake, fused fingers, gaussian, getty images, grainy, gross proportions, high pass filter, jpeg artifacts, logo, long neck, low quality, low quality, lowres, malformed limbs, missing arms, missing legs, monochrome, morbid, morning, mutated, mutated hands, mutation, mutilated, noisy, normal quality, obese, out of focus, out of frame, out of shot, over saturation, over shadow, overlay, oversaturation , painting, photography, polygons, poorly drawn face, poorly drawn hands, portrait, rendering, screenshot, signature, smooth skin, soft light, software, text, text, titles, too many fingers, twitter ui, ugly, ugly eyes, ui, username, vignette, watermark, watermark, wireframe, words, worst quality, worst quality, worst quality, writing, zoomed

- Initial Image - by default the AI will do something random. If you give it an image, it will start from that and 'dream' something similar. It's recommended to add small images here, they recommend 700px or 1024px at most on the bigest side. It's best to resize photos before adding them here otherwise the processing will be much slower with no actual benefit to the image itself. One good free, clean & simple software that I recommend  for that is IrfanView. You can also crop the input images so that the person is a bigger part of the photo/zoomed in and will turn out higher quality.

- Inpaint - if you select an image, you'll see this button and it allows you to select an area on the image. The AI will modify only that area and will keep the rest like the original. You can use it to 'photoshop' things. Like you add an image with a blue car on the street, select the car, write in the prompt red car, run it a few times and you should get it to replace the cars and make it look seamless 

- Seed - not important; the variation number. if you want to share the generated image you can give all the settings and the seed number and anyone else running it will get the same identical image 

- Number of images: how many images to generate for you. Increasing "in parallel" generates them quicker at the cost of more GPU

- Model: the AI you want to do the image

- Custom VAE: the processing done after the image is ready. for the anime one, I use Anything, for the rest I use the default one vae-ft-mse

- Sampler: if no input image is provided, these are some algorithms used when calculating image randomness geeky stuff. I use and recommend Euler_a

- Image size: depends on your computer power. I usually do small images like 512px max and 1024px when going for larger images like the ones I posted here on patreon. Going for bigger sizes I sometimes get errors because of my GPU. You can later increase the size of your images if you like them 

IMPORTANT! larger image sizes work best with input images. If you do just text prompts, for images bigger thank 512x512px the AI is gonna do them in separate chunks, not as as one whole image, so you might end up with deformities like two heads, 4 arms etc. You can get away with 640-768px but bigger than that you'll always see them. What I do for text only portrait shots is 448x640px and 640x448px for landscape. Then I just hit Upscale on the images that look good to make them bigger

- Inference Steps: how many times the AI goes over an image. More is better but takes more time. Most people do 25. Then if you like an image that was generated you can ask the AI to run over it again and make it better

- Guidance Scale: it's how much the AI cares about the prompt. The more it is the more it tries to force things to be closer to the prompt text. I usually do 7-12. 

- Prompt Scale: if you have an initial image set you'll see this. It's how much the AI cares about the input image. At 0 it keeps the original intact, at 0.99 it changes 99% of it. I usually go with 0.6

 - JPEG Quality: the final quality of the image generated, I keep it at 75 

- Show a live preview: I don't use it but it might be useful, it allows you to see what the AI is doing so that you can stop it if you don't like and not waste time 

- Fix incorrect face and eyes: corrects faces, eyes after the image is done. I usually don't use it. If there's an image I like that has problems I just click "Fix Faces" directly on that image. This is awesome for photorealism but it does get rid of cool makeup, face tattoos, things like that unfortunately

- Upscale image: I don't leave it checked. same as above, I run multiple smaller images and if I like one I click on Upscale directly and just for that image, to not waste time to have it upscale all of them. After it finishes as image, it makes it 4x bigger. Making the images directly on that bigger size would take a looot more time and it would of insane quality. This is just a trick to get a bit more out of the images you generate

- Show only the corrected/upscaled images - I'm not sure what it does, I always have it on 

- Image modifiers - I never used them. they just add those words to the prompts. Like if you press doodle it adds ", doodle" to your prompt when you run it

When hovering the mouse over an image you'll also see:

- use as input - moves that image as an input image. Useful when you do random stuff. Like I did with the Xmas girls in the previous post: I generated 8 Xmas hotties first that were random, then I picked one that I licked, clicked this, and hit go again. It then generated variations of just that one image 

- Make similar images - a quick way to do the above without replacing the input image. If you like an image you can click that and it will generate 5 similar images 

- Draw another 25 steps - the AI goes over the image again and tries to correct more stuff 

- Upscale - makes the image 4x larger

- Fix Faces - improves the faces, especially the eyes on that image 

For the photorealism stuff I used setting like this: Inference Steps: 25, Guidance Scale: 12, Model: HassanBlend1.4, VAE: vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned, Prompt Strength:0.6 . For prompts I used the negative prompt posted above and at prompt I just described the vam image. You can find cool example prompts for that ai model (hassanblend) here https://rentry.org/sdhassan#merged-models and on reddit like https://www.reddit.com/r/sdnsfw/comments/yzaj6e/sexy_demons_hassans_blend_13/

I'll get into specific examples too but for now, this should be enough to get anyone interested started. If you have any trouble or questions let me know!