This must have taken a billion dog years to animate and color. Her movement, the complicated light shafts, and the way you can barely see her nipples through the dress are all amazing. I love this!
If we want to get literary, it's a physical representation of her sexual desire, which in this scene has been embarrassingly exposed by her soon-to-be lover. She makes a surface level attempt to conceal it but exposes herself in the process, priming her for contact with her man. Indeed, she is distracted away from her simulacrum by the real thing moments later. He is not so easily covered up. He has seen her desire. She knows that he knows. They are inevitable.
Writing all that makes it seem like some huge process. It's way easier than drawing something. But a breakdown of the drawing process is like:
Draw some lines. Color 'em in.
The main bottleneck for AI is the time it takes to generate images. If my computer was infinitely fast, it would only take minutes. As it is now I usually queue up a batch to run when I'm afk, which isn't often.
The first step is to dial in the prompt and settings. I test different models and denoising strengths to see what looks good. Sometimes it has trouble understanding a pose until you give it the right prompt. In this case it understood it fairly well, but specifying hands_on_hips, short_sleeves, and pencil_skirt helped.
Once it starts looking good, I generate a bunch of images with the those settings. Then I piece together the good ones in photoshop and do a little retouching. It's rare for one image to have good everything so I'll take the face from one, the body from another, etc. The hands are usually messed up and have to have parts redrawn.
Then I export the composite image and upscale it 3x. Then I'll do AI inpainting on key parts to high-res-ify them. In this case, her face, her boobs, and her waist. I tried her skirt a couple times but I ended up keeping the original.
The main thing for this one is that I knew it would work since I had already done the prompt testing part at low resolution on my old video card. In general a simple pinup pose like this is easy since there is lots of training data for it. I have yet to get good results on unusual angles like this https://satinminions.com/Suction-Dildo-Shower-04.html or first person shots.
It is possible to just run an image through and get pretty good results. But if you want a high res output where you struggle to find flaws, more work is required. Here is the raw output for this image: https://satinminions.com/SD-15675-Raw.html
This turned into a minor blog post, don't mind me:
Stable diffusion works best on single character scenes in standard poses. Pinups basically. It's also pretty good at backgrounds.
The issue is that it doesn't reliably understand relative conditional statements or adjectives. So if you prompt it "a blue ball on top of a red box", it will give you that... sometimes - but you'll also get random combinations of red, blue, ball and box. It gets worse the more adjectives and conditionals you add in.
In the case of multiple characters it's almost impossible to apply the conditionals correctly. If you say "a woman with tan skin and red hair putting bunny ears on a kneeling woman with short blonde hair wearing a red leather bustier", you're gonna get red hair on both of them a because that's a common thing and you have the "red" token in there twice. It's also going to screw up normal features twice as much because there are more things in the scene. Even getting a single character that looks good often requires rolling the dice dozens of times because random bits will be screwed up.
I have done some multiple character scenes by inpainting each part individually, but the problem is you end up with a slightly different style and lighting on each part. Plus it's very time consuming. The patchwork look is a problem even on single character composite images, it's easy to accidentally stray into something that looks like a collage or that un-tooned homer simpson meme. The recent gold dress pinup kind of strays into that territory.
Dall-E is better at comprehension but it's proprietry and too large of a model to run on consumer hardware at this time. I'm generally not interested in AI models that I can't run locally and I'm especially disinterested in corporate mandated artificial brain damage. Even if you're not trying to make edgy stuff, unfiltered models are just better because they have a more complete understanding of the world. Even stable diffusion has fallen into the "trust and safety" trap and it looks like future developments will have to be underground.
The control net extension, which I used to make the latest Alison pic, is a major improvement, but it still doesn't solve multiple characters or animations. I think the possibility is there. I could see something being added like a segmentation map where each segment could be given different prompts. Temporal stability has been shown to be possible in things like nvidia's styleGAN, and some newer text-to-video models. At some point you will be able to go from a sketch animation to a perfect render. The capability in the AI model is there, it just needs to be activated appropriately. Similar to how chat-gpt is an activation layer on top of gpt-3.
I've done a lot of AI tinkering instead of drawing lately, and some people don't like it - but I hope everyone can appreciate that this an existential crisis in art. Lots of people are in "anger" and "denial" stages of grief. I've had some truly bizarre discussions on other forums where I try to demonstrate SD's ability to generate backgrounds and they will start picking apart some 3 pixel high blob of a bush in the distance because it's not an exact technical drawing. Like, have you ever seen a painting by a person? Bob Ross? The guy just smooshed his brush on the canvas and it looks great. A bunch of people were upset that netflix made an anime short using AI for the backgrounds - but tons of anime have been using crappily filtered stock photographs and 3D models for backgrounds for decades, AI could only improve this situation. Even big budget titles frequently use painted over photographs because even among artists, very few people can generate an accurate scene entirely from their mind.
A big problem is that a lot of people are walking around without any comprehension of what they're looking at or reading or listening to. They just make value judgements based on surface level traits that, in the past, have reliably served as proxies for quality. There's a bunch of big words here? Must be wr
-itten by a smart person. This painting has lots of detail? Must be a good artist. But now AI is here that can generate surface level bullshit on demand. An offhand comment can become an essay, a doodle can become a painting. For some people, their entire way of judging things is being disrupted. Now the content and specificity of a work needs to be understood, and that is much more difficult.
I am not above this frustration myself. AI is used to crap flood plausible looking content onto all platforms now. I find myself quickly checking images for the tell-tale signs of AI, listening for verbal ticks in youtube shorts, just to quickly determine if I should ignore them. But it ain't going away. In the future there is going to be more AI in the world, not less. It's better to understand it than be taken by surprise.
Agree with Yepa here. Have been here since these were coming out in real time. Love all the new AI content, though. Any chance AI can be applied to the LC transformation scene?
In all honesty, I prefer your faces to the AI faces. The AI faces just look 'normal' your faces have more of an expressiveness to them. AI tries to establish a 'norm' Art is not about a 'norm' it's about emotion. It's about what our minds connect to. This is why the AI will never replace people - that it's only a tool at best - because it can't connect with us humans.
So, is this version of Allison canon to the LC storyline, or (to borrow from the central metaphor of Stephen King's Dark Tower series) is this just another spoke on her wheel of ka that's not connected to the Lighter Chains' spoke?
This is based off the earliest sketch of Alison, before the full lore was established. In the inspiration page https://satinminions.com/Comic-Page-Light-Chains.html it's implied she complies immediately rather than the slow burn from the full story.
Also, AI has a lot of difficulty with her chunky collar because it's an uncommon accessory compared to a choker. In the Disney-esque one https://satinminions.com/SD-16881.html it turned into a weird ribbon thing and I just gave up.
This turned into a minor blog post, don't mind me:
Stable diffusion works best on single character scenes in standard poses. Pinups basically. It's also pretty good at backgrounds.
The issue is that it doesn't reliably understand relative conditional statements or adjectives. So if you prompt it "a blue ball on top of a red box", it will give you that... sometimes - but you'll also get random combinations of red, blue, ball and box. It gets worse the more adjectives and conditionals you add in.
In the case of multiple characters it's almost impossible to apply the conditionals correctly. If you say "a woman with tan skin and red hair putting bunny ears on a kneeling woman with short blonde hair wearing a red leather bustier", you're gonna get red hair on both of them a because that's a common thing and you have the "red" token in there twice. It's also going to screw up normal features twice as much because there are more things in the scene. Even getting a single character that looks good often requires rolling the dice dozens of times because random bits will be screwed up.
I have done some multiple character scenes by inpainting each part individually, but the problem is you end up with a slightly different style and lighting on each part. Plus it's very time consuming. The patchwork look is a problem even on single character composite images, it's easy to accidentally stray into something that looks like a collage or that un-tooned homer simpson meme. The recent gold dress pinup kind of strays into that territory.
Dall-E is better at comprehension but it's proprietry and too large of a model to run on consumer hardware at this time. I'm generally not interested in AI models that I can't run locally and I'm especially disinterested in corporate mandated artificial brain damage. Even if you're not trying to make edgy stuff, unfiltered models are just better because they have a more complete understanding of the world. Even stable diffusion has fallen into the "trust and safety" trap and it looks like future developments will have to be underground.
The control net extension, which I used to make the latest Alison pic, is a major improvement, but it still doesn't solve multiple characters or animations. I think the possibility is there. I could see something being added like a segmentation map where each segment could be given different prompts. Temporal stability has been shown to be possible in things like nvidia's styleGAN, and some newer text-to-video models. At some point you will be able to go from a sketch animation to a perfect render. The capability in the AI model is there, it just needs to be activated appropriately. Similar to how chat-gpt is an activation layer on top of gpt-3.
I've done a lot of AI tinkering instead of drawing lately, and some people don't like it - but I hope everyone can appreciate that this an existential crisis in art. Lots of people are in "anger" and "denial" stages of grief. I've had some truly bizarre discussions on other forums where I try to demonstrate SD's ability to generate backgrounds and they will start picking apart some 3 pixel high blob of a bush in the distance because it's not an exact technical drawing. Like, have you ever seen a painting by a person? Bob Ross? The guy just smooshed his brush on the canvas and it looks great. A bunch of people were upset that netflix made an anime short using AI for the backgrounds - but tons of anime have been using crappily filtered stock photographs and 3D models for backgrounds for decades, AI could only improve this situation. Even big budget titles frequently use painted over photographs because even among artists, very few people can generate an accurate scene entirely from their mind.
A big problem is that a lot of people are walking around without any comprehension of what they're looking at or reading or listening to. They just make value judgements based on surface level traits that, in the past, have reliably served as proxies for quality. There's a bunch of big words here? Must be wr
-itten by a smart person. This painting has lots of detail? Must be a good artist. But now AI is here that can generate surface level bullshit on demand. An offhand comment can become an essay, a doodle can become a painting. For some people, their entire way of judging things is being disrupted. Now the content and specificity of a work needs to be understood, and that is much more difficult.
I am not above this frustration myself. AI is used to crap flood plausible looking content onto all platforms now. I find myself quickly checking images for the tell-tale signs of AI, listening for verbal ticks in youtube shorts, just to quickly determine if I should ignore them. But it ain't going away. In the future there is going to be more AI in the world, not less. It's better to understand it than be taken by surprise.
