Alter!

I am ALWAYS open to feedbacks and criticism and all inputs are welcome because they can only help me cover areas where i am less confortable to get better ❤

That's why, here is a alternate version of AnBan, based on V1 and finetuned with a dataset built from the Vpred version with contrast and color dimmed for a softer look, more adapted to some more mysterious or cozy pictures. While doing this, i messed up the hands and fixing those brought back some more contrast, but i'll probably do a separate LoRA (something like "AnBan_Noir") for a more Gothic/Film noir ambiance :D

In this version, i switched the baked in VAE from flatpiece to dark which also help mute colors and all showcase pictures have been done using Euler a instead of DPM++ 2M with "vivid colors" in the negative prompt. (note that the VAE will kick off at the end of the generation, preview pictures during generation will be brighter that the end result).

Vpred V1!

The TL;DR and long story are here: https://civitai.com/articles/10620

AnBan_Illus V2 is here! Probably the last version of this model before building a fully Illustrious BancinXL :D (NB: AnBan is an Epsilon Prediction model).

All infos on the making here: https://civitai.com/articles/10148/bancinxl-for-illustrious-step-1

Introducing Ante Bancin illustrious, aka AnBan_Illus! I honestly can't say "yeah, everybody should use this!" as this checkpoint is more of a "personal" resource for my own kinks and to serve as a base for training the "BancinXL" style upon :D

I tested and used with success for now:

DPM++ 2M - Karras
Classic SDXL resolutions: 832x1216, 1024x1024, 1216x832
25 steps, CFG at 5
Adetailer (only if needed) at 0.4 for inpainting, sometimes switching to Euler a if i want a softer feel.
Hires.Fix at 0.4 too, with 20 steps, CFG at 5 too
Forge integrated FreeU and SelfAttentionGuidance with default values
and i kept my CLIP skip at 2, probably because i am lazy :D

Positive prompt:

[whatever your usual prompt is, without the Pony Scores],
masterpiece, best quality, amazing quality, very aesthetic, absurdres, newest

Negative prompt (if you want to remove the flat touch, use flat color in the negative prompt and bonus point, deep_negative_pony embedding give good result too!)

bad quality,worst quality,worst detail,sketch,censored,watermark,signature,artist name,flat color,deep_negative_pony

Origin story

You can probably already close the tab and go back to your own activities, but if you like stories, here is one ;-)

Everyone is jumping on the Illustrious train and freckledvixon is spamming with cool LoRAs i can't test until i jump too. :D

But for now, everybody and everyone is releasing their own trained/merged checkpoints everywhere (even if some of those are starting to get lots of attention) and there was not one checkpoint that exactly ticked with what i like... so, like all the people, i did my magic mixture to get a base i like for tests and on which i'll build later on to port BancinXL to Illustrious.

Why this mixture? Here is some example:

IllustreijL (i like the body type, more mature, but the facial expression is not "anime like" and the skin texture is not "shiny smooth", even with a LoRA)

NTR-MIX (i like the facial expression, more anime like character, but not the body type and too "flat")

Lilly Anime (much more close to my taste on textures, but the facial expression and body type is not quite what i wanted)

So, what could i do? Guess-mix stuff! Here is the recipe with the resources from above (and this LoRA), because in the full spirit of Opensource, i don't believe in hiding the original sources, not crediting the authors and claiming this is "mine" :D

Checkpoints are merged using Checkpoint Merger
LoRA are merged in checkpoints using SuperMerger

And here is what i ended up with :D

Still quite not there, too light for my taste, but it will be perfect for my next steps ;-)

Thanks for reading!