Cerene Origins Update 05 - consistent characters (Patreon)

Hope everyone's having a good Christmas.

As mentioned in my last post I'll document some of my game development experiences. Before we go over my next animation experiments there are two important items that are necessary for good AI animations.

enhancing character concepts

While it is possible to get good results with just a good prompt and model I use a more deterministic approach. First I generate a ton of concepts to give a bunch of potentials, varying the details between batches to change up body shape, outfit, facial features, hair styles, etc. When I have a potential concept I upscale, enhance and often inpaint the various outfit/ armor pieces to match my vision for the character.

Enclosed a couple of examples of how a character went from a draft concept to final version. You'll need to view in fullscreen to see the differences and details.

consistent characters

One of the biggest problems with AI to this day is creating a quality consistent character with outfit. I've solved this problem. Still needs improvement, but the results are good.

Once you've trained a lora or fine tuned a model with your character it's able to accurately generate the character with its intricacies, however the problem is, to be able to train a lora you need a dataset of your character with a consistent look and outfit in the first place. I tried all the available solutions but they produced low quality results or variations that were too far from the original. Eventually I pieced together a workflow that worked great. Keep in mind that a good dataset has to feature the characters with a consistent look, body shape and (if part of the character) outfit and hair style in various poses, camera angles and lighting conditions.

I've included two examples of the characters Aveline and Veronica. Aveline is a somewhat spoiled aristocrat (female, human) and Veronica is her personal maid (dick girl, human). All the images were produced without a lora or fine-tuned model.

I've also included Iris as an example of a character with a consistent outfit and one of Aveline's dresses.

I wasn't planning on including an animation, but I had this little idea for a meme clip... It's not lip synced, that's why it doesn't quite match.

But I am planning on posting one more update around the end of the year with animation experiments.