The Rest: October 2023

Hello! Before you proceed, please take the time to note the TWO folders containing a combined 350+ AI-generated images attached to the end of this post! There are two folders this time because the average image size has increased significantly, which pushed the zip folder size past what Patreon could handle for an individual file. These images come from four separate sessions, each of which I'll describe individually, in chronological order. I'll also be including the images I used as the basis for each session to give you all a better sense of what NovelAI had to work with. For some basic notes on my AI image generation process as well as my intent/goals with the Re-AImagined content, check out my previous 'The Rest' posts, where I go into those things in detail.

Arciella Session #2 - Early November 2022

This session is notable for several reasons. First of all, it's the earliest session I've posted to date and the second session I ever did with NovelAI (the first session was a generic Arci session that may see the light of day at some point). It was followed immediately by the third Arci session which I posted back in February. These sessions were my first experiences ever using NovelAI or any AI image generator, and their overall quality was what motivated me to make the Re-AImagined Gallery a recurring thing. Furthermore, they were very useful signposts for me regarding what NovelAI could and couldn't reliably do: many of the lessons I learned from these sessions are lessons I've applied to nearly every session since. The stuff that I've talked at length about by this point (catgirl characters sometimes having an inconsistent number of ears and/or tails, the differences between 0.7 and 0.99 power, and the inevitability of small, intricate details needing some touching up by hand after the fact) were among my big takeaways from the Arci sessions, and in that sense I got very lucky in choosing to try her before anyone else.

Arci translates into NovelAI better than I would ever have predicted, even now. The asterisk there is that, barring a future where Arciella is somehow a popular tag on Danbooru, NovelAI is never, ever going to get her 'spore bumps' right, but I realized fairly quickly that I could work around that hiccup just by adding the spore bumps in by hand afterward. This is why these bumps stand out a bit in the final images - more than usual, anyway. Bumps aside, all of Arci's other key features are NovelAI-friendly: green skin, check; glowing yellow eyes, check; fluffy ears and tail, check (tail sometimes not included); giant preggo belly, oh yes; even her earrings show up sometimes, though for this session I didn't worry about those. 

Personalitywise, Arci is one of my more 'feminine' characters, if we're measuring femininity by stereotypical anime standards (generally not a good idea.) She's cheerful, positive, polite and (I mean this in the best possible way) a little ditzy, while also being loyal and gentle to a sometimes-problematic degree. But she also has a concealed 'lustful' side, which in this case is really a lust for gluttonous excess, which can peek through in some of her expressions and behaviours. Thus, her personality translated basically one to one between Axu2 and these sessions, in my opinion. If I sound a little critical or jaded about this, it's because I am (I spent a lot of years drawing fat art of popular anime girls, so I'm also absolutely a hypocrite), but I do recognize that anime girls aren't a net negative if understood as their own thing rather than as accurate representations of women as a whole (same goes for my characters, really.) These characters are very appealing to their target demographic by design, but as long as that demographic understands the difference between waifu and non-virtual woman, I think they're positive in how they provide a source of comfort and acceptance that might not always be available in real life. Is it escapist? Yes. Do these benefits get overshadowed if one becomes dependent on or deluded by them? Also yes. Everything in moderation. In that sense, I do my best when writing Arci these days to own her flaws and problematic aspects: you're never going to find an Arci irl, but there are many reasons why you probably understand that already. She's a larger than life character, but the overwhelming majority of cartoon characters are, so engage with them accordingly.

Alright, that's my irrelevant opinion out of the way for this month. Returning to the process behind this session, the next notable thing about it is of course its halloween theming. You might have noticed that the point in time at which I worked on this session doesn't match the timing for this month's gallery, and that's because when I worked on it I didn't immediately plan on doing a halloween themed gallery (though the idea came to me pretty quickly.) My reason for playing around with 'Dusknoirci' was actually completely different, and a little embarrassing. For those unfamiliar with the Pokemon Dusknoir, please take a moment to google it (be careful with image search, for reasons you already know.) Notice the 'eye' shaped bumps on its midsection. Now look at the Arciella reference I've attached to this post. Now look back at Dusknoir. Now back at Arci. Now google 'Charti Berry' (also from Pokemon) and look at that. Do you see the problem?

This resemblance is something I only started noticing within the past handful of years, and it quickly horrified me. It's also not the first time I've unintentionally taken design choices from Pokemon and applied them to my own characters (I'll never forget the first time I heard someone refer to the Pokemon Chansey as an 'axolotl'. That was a stomach lurch and a half.) It's not restricted to Pokemon either; in fact, it's something I struggle with on a daily basis. For whatever reason, I'm very, very prone to a form of memory bias known as Cryptoamnesia, in which one mistakenly believes that forgotten memories that return are actually new ideas. It happens to everyone from time to time, but scholarly sources have suggested that it happens more frequently when the individual encounters the original idea while under a 'heavy cognitive load' and may not fully register the idea's source. Based on my own experiences as someone with ADD, I feel like 'distraction' should be added to the list of causes for Cryptoamnesia, as I've spent a lot of time multitasking, and a conspicuous amount of that time has been spent playing Pokemon games. These days, I tend to google any name or idea that just comes to me, on the off-chance that I lifted it from a game or video from several years ago. And I'm still coming across cases involving my characters that I never caught before. Lemme tell you, it's a shitty feeling. But in cases like this one, I don't think it's a serious issue either (I guess that would be up to GameFreak, but I get the impression they have better things to do with their time than go after a niche fetish artist for sticking Dusknoir's fake belly eyes on an otherwise unrelated waifu.) Rather, it's more embarrassing to me to see Dusknoir of all things every time I look at Arci's belly. I am so sorry if you're cursed to see it now too (which you are.) Please don't blame Arci; she didn't design her spore bumps.

All of this is what prompted me to see if I could recreate Arci's belly bumps in NovelAI by adding the tag 'Dusknoir' to the prompt. I figured I might as well make the most of my unintended stomach ornament theft by seeing if NovelAI would recognize the logic behind it. Spoiler alert: it didn't work. I didn't know how to prioritize certain tags at this point, so instead I just repeated the 'Dusknoir' tag several times throughout the prompt, which did sort of prioritize the tag, in a very weird way. Instead of giving Arci spore bumps, it just altered her outfit slightly to be vaguely Dusknoir-themed. Eventually, it started changing her skin colour as well. It was at this point that I realized I wasn't going to get NovelAI to generate the damn spore bumps, but now I was intrigued because essentially I had put Arci in a sort of Dusknoir cosplay, and the results looked kind of cool. I'd already added in some halloween-themed tags since I figured that might somehow increase the odds of NovelAI recognizing what the hell a 'Dusknoir' was, so the jump to having Arci dress up as Dusknoir for halloween was a pretty easy one to make. The rest should be self-evident.

I should briefly mention the pumpkins since they appear just as prominently as the Dusknoir features throughout this session. Again, I must reiterate that I did not know how to prioritize tags at this point, so what you see here is entirely based on the use of unemphasized 'trick or treat', 'halloween bucket', and 'jack o lantern' tags midway into the prompt. As far as I'm concerned, this ended up being a happy accident, as it meant I got plenty of results with Arci either sitting in a jack o lantern or partially dressed as one, both of which are blessed concepts.

One final note with this session: I returned to it a few days ago to upscale the images I'd selected for this gallery, since they wouldn't have matched the rest of the gallery otherwise and I thought they deserved the treatment. I hadn't really clued in to how to effectively upscale existing images in NovelAI until a few months ago, which is a shame because if I'd figured it out sooner I think it would have improved a lot of the earlier galleries. For those curious, my method is to use the existing image as a base, set the power slider between 0.1 and 0.3 (depending on if you want to try and improve the image at all), and the noise to 0.05, then generate. I start small even with this method as I like to do upscaling proper via the 'enhance' feature, but there's multiple ways to go about the whole process and all of them work just fine imo.

Biri Session #1 - Mid September 2023

This costume was suggested by you, the patrons! Thank you for the nice meme!

I'll be brief with the rest of these sessions, but especially this one. It's notable in a few ways, none of which I plan to repeat for any future sessions, barring exceptional circumstances. First off, these images were generated with no base image, so they're entirely based on the prompts and on NovelAI's database/logic. Second, they were made using NovelAI's 'Furry' module rather than its 'AI (Full)' module (the one I've use for the rest of these sessions.) That's not a knock against furry art so much as a product of NovelAI's furry module still being in beta and therefore not being as reliable as the others. I'd played around with it before prior to this session and the results were never thrilling, but in this case I recognized that it was the only way I was going to make something as specific as 'a snake in a business suit with a briefcase' work. And yes, I did specify 'snake' and not 'snake woman.' My original intent was to go full-meme with this session and represent Biri as her snakey self rather than as an anthro snakegirl (which she is not... yet??) But given that I was using a furry art module, it was much more inclined to produce anthro art (and by that I mean, I couldn't get one damn result where Biri was just a snake and not a snakegirl. Not one.) There were occasionally snakes in the results, but they were always next to the humanoid subject rather than being the subject themselves (and none of them were wearing suits either.) That said, I didn't spend a lot of time with this session given its jokey nature, so it's likely that if I'd really played around the tags I would have eventually gotten some more 'canon' results. Take that for what it's worth.

Nevertheless, this was still a fun session because it prompted me to actually do some thinking about Biri's design, which I really hadn't done prior to that point. I knew her personality (which fit perfectly with the snake oil saleswoman idea already), but physically speaking... she's just a boa. Researching boas for this session led me to the conclusion that she is in fact a green anaconda, which by delightful coincidence is both a type of boa and also pound-for-pound the largest snake in the world, known for swallowing things far larger than itself! Biri real.

I added the 'Indian' tag because I've always imagined Biri as vaguely East Indian in appearance (or as East Indian as you can be when you're just a talking snake.) I'm not sure if this has to do with my shitty Eurocentric idea of 'Indian woman = pretty eyes and long eyelashes???' but just do me a favour and don't look into it too much. Biri's a joke character and her lore isn't meant to reference anything or anyone irl. But on the subject of pretty eyes, I added tags like 'big eyes',  mascara, orange eyeliner, and {{orange eyeshadow}} to bring out her eyes as much as possible, and this is where I think these images of her get the closest to how she would look if I were to draw her at some point (it'll happen eventually, maybe.) With one exception: notice that I specified 'orange eyeshadow'. Now look through every attached image from this session and note how not one of them has orange eyeliner. I can't explain why, but NovelAI was bent on giving her blue, turquoise or green eyeliner, but never orange. Is this of much consequence? No, but I feel like Biri would want you to know that it isn't representative. Orange is her favourite colour because it attracts all the best customers. Blue eyeliner just attracts that one weirdo melkai with the paintbrush.

To summarize: no, Biri is not humanoid, no she does not wear blue eyeliner, and no she does not have hair either (but she does rock it better than I anticipated.)

Vespa Session #2 - Late September 2023

Cowgirl Vespa was another suggestion made by you, the Patrons, and it was surprisingly the simplest and quickest of all these sessions. I was initially hesitant to try this idea because of the difficulties in reproducing Vespa's design that I talked about in July's notes: her skin and hair colour vary wildly, NovelAI doesn't know to add her differently-coloured hands and feet, and most of all her eyes are never solid white. I'd figured out after the previous Vespa session that the eye issue wasn't a big deal because I could just go in and make them solid white after the fact, but the other potential issues were still major concerns to me. Until I started putting together the tags for this session and realized how similar they were to the tags I'd used for the first one. Turns out, pirates and cowboys both wear leather, have wide-brimmed hats, walk around in big leather boots, and frequently ride/sail off into sunsets. Additionally, the cowboy outfit allowed me to keep Vespa mostly clothed, which solved the issue of her hands and feet while limiting the overall number of places her skin colour could be screwed up. Thus, this session ended up being pretty plug-and-play, with the only adjustments I made being to emphasize the odd Western-themed tag or remind NovelAI that Vespa should not in fact be half-naked. 

To this latter point, I'd like to address the 'bum shot', which I included as part of the main gallery because I have to admit, it's completely in character, moreso than most of the other images from this session. Yes, I swear I did not intentionally remove her pants. I was really trying to minimize the amount of bare skin in this session (albeit for the reasons mentioned above where I didn't want to have to spend time correcting mistakes in skin tone). But when there's a line in Axu2 about Vespa walking around everywhere with a bare butt, I have to appreciate how unintentionally fitting it is that NovelAI decided to remove her pants midway through the session. It didn't stop me from repeatedly adjusting the tags to tell it to stop doing that, but I'm admittedly more of a prude than Vespa herself (not a high bar to pass), and I really do think she'd find the whole thing pretty funny, so fuck it.

Selkie Session #3 - Late September 2023

This idea was one I came up with and absolutely had to try. The obvious pun is one thing, but I think it's fully in Selkie's character to be a gambler or casino employee, with the caveat that she probably wouldn't last long in either role before being banned from the premises. It also gave me the chance to play around with a casino setting, which resulted in some messy but fun visual delirium that I didn't bother spending much time cleaning up afterward. You probably noticed that immediately when looking through these images: the cards, chips, and tables are pretty janky, and some of the images stop making sense when you stare at them for a little while. This might just be my opinion, but I didn't find any of those inconsistencies distracting or even out-of-tone given that the subject was Selkie; she's not 'crazy' by any stretch (not technically anyway), but there is a sense of mania and mayhem to her that I'm not sure I've done justice in Axu2 as of yet. You could call her a Manic Pixie Sharkgirl if you wanted, except instead of coming in and fixing people's lives, she typically does the exact opposite. Chaotic, spontaneous, and self-interested is how I'd describe her, which is the vibe I wanted to give these images. Selkie doesn't care if the cards don't make sense! We're not sure if she even knows how to play cards! Either she does and she's really good at it, or she's making it up as she goes. Probably the latter. But either way, she's gonna look real fly doing it!

I decided not to worry as much about Selkie's shark tail this time around for a couple of reasons. One, she's in costume and maybe she could hide her tail in her pants or something (aka I'm lazy); Two, the headache involved in getting NovelAI to reliably generate her shark tail wasn't worth the effort (aka I'm lazy). If I'd given myself a bit more time with this session, I probably would have been more meticulous about including the tail, but the tradeoff would have been the same as the last Selkie session: sharks, everywhere. Am I saying that turning the casino setting into a scene from Sharknado 69 wouldn't have been funny? No. In fact, now that I think about it, I kind of want to see what that would look like. I was already going for the whole visual delirium vibe, so I may have made a mistake by cutting the random background sharks out of the picture. ...Sorry about that. But either way, her tail did end up showing up in a few results, so I cleaned it up and included those results where able. Notably, and purely by accident, NovelAI ended up including Selkie's elbow fins in one of the results this session, which was exciting! Granted, it almost certainly wasn't trying to make elbow fins (I'm not really sure what it was trying to do to be honest), and it took a lot of editing by hand to get that particular result to a place where it could be included in the main gallery, but I'm happy that at least for one image Selkie got a little closer to her in-canon design than ever before.

Tail aside, I had to make the usual adjustments by hand to the results from this session so that they were properly Selkie: filling in her ears and adding the scars to the tip of the left one; drawing on her gills and side-eye piercings, and colouring her eyes red (I didn't worry much about getting them to appear red when generating the images since it was a quick fix anyway.) Selkie being mostly clothed here also meant I didn't have to worry about adding her shoulder tattoos, arm bandages, or miscellaneous other little design bits, which helped me focus more on getting just the right amount of crazy out of both Selkie and the background. Ultimately, this session isn't the cleanest or 'best' I've done by any stretch, but it's one of my favourites for how well it fits the character (turns out Selkie looks good in a suit. I'm definitely not keeping that in mind for down the road, no siree, cute girls in suits aren't a weakness of mine, shush, stop it, I'm in this post and I don't like it.)