The Rest: March 2023

Hello! Before you proceed, please take the time to note the folder of 250+ AI-generated images attached to the end of this post! These images come from three 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.

Anya Session #4 - Late November 2022

Those of you who have read through last month's notes may notice that we've skipped over 'Anya Session #3' here, and there's a good reason for that. Session 3, to put it tactfully, was a bit of an experiment. Yes, some of the images from that set turned out just fine, but they will require some significant touching up to make them pinup worthy, so I'll be saving them for a later date when I have more time to set aside for that. Suffice to say for now though that session 3 bridges the gap between session 2 and this session. How so? Well, I kept many of the tags and tricks I'd used in session 2 while working on session 3, but with a different image source and many more new tags that I had never tried before. Session 3 also picked up a few threads from session 1 in that I tried to emphasize tags related to belly stuffing so as to see if I could communicate to NovelAI how that fetish was represented visually. Doing so was a challenge, and the results, as mentioned, were mixed. I discovered a few idiosyncrasies to do with specific tags I'd been using, and also discovered a few new tags, some of which produced... less than desirable results (see my notes on using the 'burp' tag from last month. This is the session where I really discovered the, er, baggage carried with that specific tag, as it were.) Mostly though, I just ended up pushing the limits of what NovelAI could represent, ending up in a grey area where the utility could technically be made to represent a thing, but the quality would be too janky to make it worth touching up. Whenever I end up posting the results from session 3, I'll get into more specific detail on what I tried and what I learned, but for now I'll move onto the session represented with this month's gallery, session 4, and what I learned from session 3 that helped this session out a bit.

To start, the burp tag was out, for obvious reasons. I also moved away from tags like 'stuffing' and 'eating' (though I'd return to them for future sessions where they felt more appropriate.) Here, my goal was to focus more on a select few belly-related tags to see if it netted me more consistent results. This meant emphasizing the shit out of the 'big belly' tag like so: {{{{{{big belly}}}}}. I also included the tags 'belly' and 'fat rolls', both of which I'd used in Anya sessions 1 and 3 as well. I also wanted to see how different clothing-related tags would work with this emphasis (aka if I could get the tum to go smush,) and so I ended up including spicier tags like 'garter straps' and 'garter belt' to interact more directly with Anya's girth. The results were far better than what I'd hoped for, and so I ran with the theme. For those interested, those two tags work really well with 'big belly' and 'fat rolls'. A consequence of this interaction was that the image set ended up becoming a 'fat Anya' set more than a simple belly-themed set, which was fine by me. I figured this was a good opportunity to conceptualize Anya's body shape following the fan club questline in Axu2, although with that said I can't say that any of these images are canon depictions of this shape, but I could certainly see some horny painters in Imperium taking some 'creative liberties' and producing images similar to them.

With this session, I also became wary of over-enhancing the images I generated, as I had done a lot of that with session 3 to try and push results in more specific directions, and I'd mostly just succeeded in making the results really blurry and oversaturated. I did do a lot of enhancing with this session as well, but instead of continually enhancing each new image and blurring it into oblivion, I backtracked more often to the original results and changed the parameters of how I enhanced them to see if I could get closer to what I wanted with fewer steps. This method ended up working decently well, and you can see the results by comparing images from within sets like 'nywtrss32' (included in the attached folder). The base image here took me by surprise with how in-your-face it was, but it had significant flaws. By returning to the initial result and enhancing it instead of creating a chain of entropy by enhancing the enhanced versions, I was able to reach a solution which solved all the major issues I had with the piece (those being the positions of Anya's arms and making sure her hand was facing the right way) while keeping its crispness. The exception was with Anya's tail, which, as you can see, refused to acknowledge that it was supposed to be attached to Anya's tailbone instead of something mysterious just out of frame. I ended up having to correct this by hand when touching up the best image from the set for inclusion in the main gallery. As I've mentioned in the past two months' notes, this is not at all unusual with neko tails generated by NovelAI, and these days it doesn't particularly rattle me when it happens. It does make me wary of overcomplicating backgrounds though, which can make the touchup process much longer and trickier. 

On that note, let's talk about backgrounds, specifically those involving wood, bricks, and/or furniture. They're a pain in the ass to generate. On their own, I imagine they turn out a little better, which does raise some possibilities in my mind for future experiments. But when combined with a character, these backgrounds end up getting confused and mismatched. Chairs sit at impossible angles, railings and fences don't line up logically, and perspective in general becomes more of an abstract concept that you have to imply rather than delineate. This session has many good examples where an otherwise promising result was made unusable by the complete nonsense going on behind Anya's back. Sometimes, enhancing the result can patch up some inconsistencies, but just like with misplaced neko tails, this is not a reliable fix, and it's usually better to just generate new results and hope everything falls into place. There are also fringe cases where the background is janky if you look at it for too long, but either it's subtle enough that it doesn't ruin the flow of the image, or it's managed to turn out somewhat artsy and I like it enough to just go with it. Take the 'nywtrss25' images, where the table in the background isn't really distinct from the rest of the background, but with all the swirling paper and orange haze it really doesn't look that out of place either. I had to do a lot of compromising with this session's images since Anya herself usually looked fantastic, and some image sets were too promising for me to give up on them because the background wanted to take a few pages out of Picasso's book. Ultimately though, sessions like this one have helped me be more wary of what background and object tags I should and shouldn't use, and what to be wary of if/when I do use them.

The dimensions of the images generated with this session are worth mentioning in passing, as I believe they played a role in the specific style NovelAI latched onto here. You may have noticed differences between how Anya's face and features are drawn in these images versus in sessions 1 and 2. While I'm sure some of these differences have to do with the differences in tags used/emphasized, the contents of the source image, and how much enhancing occurred, I think the primary factor is the unusual shape of the source image I uploaded (512x576). At the time, I hadn't done much research into what made NovelAI tick, so I had no idea that image dimensions could impact the results (though in hindsight it certainly makes sense.) I had simply cropped Anya out of the Celebrity Glutton artwork (included below, and which, by total coincidence, features another character featured in this month's gallery). Regarding what dimensions you're 'supposed' to use, guides and posts I've come across sometimes recommend sticking with NovelAI's preset 'portrait' dimensions for image generations featuring a single character, as these dimensions apparently lead to the most consistent output. This does make me wonder, though, if there isn't some creative merit to be had in playing around with unusual dimensions. I have yet to test this theory, but reflecting on it does make me want to do so, likely by generating images with the same tags I used for this session but with different dimensions. Anya session #5, coming soon to a Patreon near you?

Amber Session #3 - Mid/Late February 2023

First things first: I need to apologize because the images from this set and the Abby set in this month's 'The Rest' folder are completely out of chronological order. This is due to having switched to a new PC with different settings that I haven't gotten around to tweaking for my purposes yet. Essentially, I ended up naming the images from these sessions after the fact rather than as I saved them, meaning there's no linear progression represented in their ordering here. Usually I like to give a sense of how the session proceeded from start to finish so it's easier to follow along with my notes and the images themselves, so I regret that I can't do that here! I'll do my best to have next month's folder organized like the previous few were.

Moving on to the session itself, you'll notice again that we've skipped over a couple of sessions here. In this case, that has nothing to do with the quality or the time required to touch up any of the images. Rather, I just thought this session fit better with the more 'urban casual' vibe of the other two this month (and yes, I am operating under the assumption that 'urban casual' is in fact a term I just made up). The first two Amber sessions focused on her in uniform- her maid outfit. I'm quite happy with how both sessions turned out, so expect to see them represented in a future gallery! With this session though, I wanted to focus on Amber's off-work persona, despite the fact that it really isn't all that different from her at-work one. The source image I used for these generations is from a piece I drew featuring Amber and Leslie (an old friend's character who you may remember from Axu2 and also January's Re-AImagined gallery) out on the town after sunset. It's not a particularly detailed piece, with most of the work having gone into how round I could make Leslie, which was par for the course at that time. But I do like the concept of showing the residents of Costa Del Nyan enjoying the city's nightlife, which is a theme I'm hoping to return to in Axu2 as well. That was my starting point for this session, with one slight exception. Canonically, Amber can't really afford to overeat, like, at all. Instead, she lives vicariously through watching others eat at the maid cafe where she works (or through mooching off Leslie, who can and does overeat at whim). She also hasn't spent a ton of time thinking about how much she could eat if she had the resources, so canonically she'd be fairly shocked to see some of the images from this session. That said, I purposely tried to focus on belly sizes that weren't too outrageous and which might be achievable for a skinny girl with very few funds (albeit a skinny girl living in a fantasy universe where the entire conceit is that basically everyone can overeat in ways that aren't possible or healthy in the real world as long as they have the moxie, and Amber is more or less a being of pure moxie, so...) 

The first few images from this session proceeded from the end of the previous session which, spoiler alert, had a slight casino theme to it, courtesy of the 'casino' tag. I kept the casino tag for a little while and then removed it halfway through the session to see if doing so made a difference (as far as I can tell, it didn't.) Part of me does want to attribute the pyramid-like brick wall in many of the images to that tag though, because I feel like pyramids have become somewhat of a classic casino trope in and of themselves. Then again, the wall in most of these images is clearly based on the shape of the floodlight put over Amber in the source image, so their being pyramid shape is probably just a coincidence.

The major challenge with this session was the same as that of the previous two Amber sessions: trying to prioritize hairstyles that were even remotely close to Amber's actual hair. I had accepted from the start that trying to reproduce Amber's exact hairstyle was a fool's errand, as it comes from the same Yu-Gi-Oh-esque category of 'Axlwisp had no direct reference for this hairstyle and so not even Axlwisp knows how it actually works'. I couldn't even begin to tell you what Amber's hair is supposed to be or how it works, let alone how to convey that look via tags, so I settled on experimenting with one or two specific tags that captured aspects of her  hairstyle rather than trying to go one-to-one with it. In this regard, the tag 'pompadour' seemed to help convey some of the whimsicalness of Amber's do, and overall none of the styles she ended up with looked so out of place that I couldn't see her rocking them somehow. It helped that, unlike with Anya, NovelAI got the colour of Amber's hair right immediately, which was much more important than replicating its exact style. I used the following tags, emphasized accordingly, to convey this colour: red hair, [orange hair]. Overall, given that I ended up liking the directions NovelAI took with her hairstyle, the Amber sessions (especially this one) were some of the simplest and most enjoyable I've done so far, with some of my favourite results as well.

This brings me to the biggest difference in how I approached Amber with these sessions compared to other characters: spending much more time around 0.7 strength than I usually would. The reason I did this was because NovelAI did such a solid job of capturing the feel of Amber at this strength that I decided the relative cartooniness of the generations could be used to her advantage. Normally this is not how I go about things, because 0.9 and up are where you get the more dynamic, fleshed out, intricate results that really get your attention. It isn't that this wasn't the case here, but rather that less was also more.

Here's a lengthy tangent that you didn't ask for, but which I hope helps explain my thought process. If you go off tags alone, Amber is a very unremarkable character (minus the pompadour and cat features, which are themselves pretty normal relative to everyone else I've tried so far.) She's one of many nekos and by far the least famous or remarkable, even if you narrow that category to include only nekos whose names start with the letter A (see all three of this month's character choices.) She isn't even the most prominent neko maid in Axugaem2, though at least she isn't Amelia, right? Hm? You thought Amber was Amelia because their names are so dang similar? How could you. 

But seriously, what has Amber got that nobody else has? She doesn't have any superpowers, magic or combat tricks, fancy gear, a deep backstory, much art to her name, not even the ability to eat insane amounts of food and/or people (because you know you've made it as a character when your best trait is being a vore character, of course.) Well, I'll tell you what Amber has that nobody else has. She has spunk! ...No, wait, Abby has that too. ...Shit. Alright. Amber has spunk AND SHE'S TALL! Haha, there! Got 'em! Spunky tall chicks win again!

Alright, I'll get to the point. Amber's biggest distinguishing factors are her energy and personality. Specifically, she's ok with being just a citizen of Del Nyan rather than anyone famous or powerful. She owns who she is, and she doesn't try to be anything she isn't. Her only priority is being her peppy, goofy, klutzy, go-getter self, and also making enough money to not get kicked out of her cave-like basement flat, but mostly the first thing. Representing her with the same caliber of image as everyone else so far just wouldn't tell the whole story there. So what, she's a slightly manic redhead who you can tell apart from everyone else because at the end of a hard night she's the only one who can still see her toes? Riveting. But now, glance at image sets mbrct9, 12, 13, and 14 in the attached folder and compare them to the pinups of other characters featured in this and the previous two galleries. My hope is that the simplicity and expressiveness of the linework in these image sets helps express what makes Amber special and worth devoting so many hours (and now, words) to. Her ordinariness and simplicity as a character, combined with her comparatively loud personality, make her well-suited to thick lines and flat, vibrant colours. In hindsight, this philosophy is the same one I adopted years ago when drawing her for the first time, and it's always been a style I come back to with her, even, apparently, when I'm not technically drawing her at all.

Abby Session #3 - Late February 2023

Warning: This section contains extended discussion of identity politics not entirely related to the image generation process itself, but relevant enough to the theme of this session that I felt it warranted inclusion here.

This is the most recent session out of everything I've posted thusfar, having taken place less than a week ago at the time of this post. I'd been meaning to return to Abby since last month's gallery, though I didn't think I'd be doing so this soon (thank my lack of foresight in making the selection poll for this month's gallery available to a handful of people, and for including 'Nekos Part Three' as a joke option.) This won't be the last time you'll see Abby in one of these galleries either: she's one of my oldest characters and has an actual backstory along with several relationships with other established characters, not to mention the fact that she's one of the protagonists of this weird rpgmaker fetish game called Axugaem2, so I have no shortage of ideas involving her. She also has the benefit of being NovelAI-friendly, aka you can generate a pretty convincing Abby using NovelAI without much difficulty or compromise. The only issue when it comes to Abby is deciding what idea or ideas to focus on each session. ...Alright, I lied. There's also the more frustrating issue of trying to explain to an artificial intelligence that your pink-haired hyperactive midget catgirl OC isn't a loli, so could it please stop trying to generate loli content, but that's a rant for another time and place entirely. Needless to say, Abby would not be amused.

I know, let's avoid getting too political here by getting slightly less political instead! Why is Abby wearing a hoodie and sweats in all these images when she has never once appeared in these clothes, like, ever? The answer: this is my attempt to give some meaningful representation to the fact of Abby's asexuality. Ok, stay with me here. You may be thinking: 'Axlwisp, you dick. Don't try to pretend your characters aren't eye candy by bringing in sexual politics again. Half these images still feature Abby with a ginormous belly, and they are still pinups after all. Why even pretend that asexuality is at all relevant to this?' ...Or you may just be thinking 'Eh? Abby's ace??' Either way, humour me for a moment here. I understand that for most people I don't have to justify anything with my art, because most people don't care as much about my art as I do, but explaining my stake in these sorts of topics is important and fairly personal to me, so here goes. 

To start broadly, my reasons for exploring gender and sexuality with my characters often come from my own experiences learning about and/or experiencing these constructs. I won't go into exhaustive detail here, but those who have followed me for a while may recall my decision about a year ago to identify as she/her (or female) online, which became they/them (in my case, genderfluid). This is something I have not felt comfortable doing in real life due to a mildly conservative upbringing, so exploring it through my art has always been a way for me to cope and develop while figuring out more about what makes me tick. Characters from Axu2 like Keiko and Riley, while very far from standins for my own experiences, have helped me learn to write from points of view that I identify with but haven't been able to put myself in for most of my life.

What I haven't ever stated as explicitly is that my sexuality has also been a part of this exploration. Yes, drawing fetish art is pretty clearly an expression of some sort of 'sexuality' in and of itself, but it's by no means as simple as that. Fetishes, erotica, and online expression are aspects of human sexuality that we as a species still don't understand let alone agree upon, which is partly why I think fetish art is more complicated than it appears at face value. An example of this is vore's popularity as a fetish. I came across a forum post a few years ago (on a site which I probably can't mention by name here) which asked the question of if vore was an Asexual Fetish. I didn't look into the topic any more than that, but the question always stuck with me. After all, out of all the people I've talked to about vore specifically over the years, not one of them ever suggested it was something they wanted to see or facilitate in real life, and some of them by contrast remarked that they didn't even like the idea outside the ultra-specific sphere of cartoon fetish art and roleplay. Even beyond vore (which understandably isn't something most anyone would want to see in real life), the impression I get is that for a lot of participants in fetish art communities, their fetishes aren't synonymous with their real life sexual preferences, or even their sexual preferences fullstop. But how does that make any sense when most people like fetish art because they see it as 'sexy'? What does asexuality have to do with that? 

I promise I'll wrap up the sexuality lecture after this paragraph, but what it comes down to is that asexuality, like sexuality, is primarily a tool people use to help describe and find themselves rather than a set-in-stone facet of their biology. Asexual experience varies between individuals and can be seen as a spectrum: it doesn't always mean 'completely without sexual desire', and very often it doesn't even mean avoidance of sex. In my case, I've considered myself demisexual for several years, meaning it's exponentially harder for me to want to do anything sexual with anyone unless I feel an emotional bond with them. At the risk of giving out TMI, I've learned from my real life experiences that trust, romantic compatibility, and my non-sexual feelings toward someone are vital for me in allowing me to feel any sexual desire toward that person at all. Without these conditions, I can find a person attractive or even 'sexy', but I won't feel any actual sexual desire or attraction toward them. I've never been one for hooking up or having flings irl largely for these reasons. My heart has to be in it, and that takes time. This is very different from my online experience, especially with fetish art, where hooking up with fictional characters never comes up, for obvious reasons. It's comforting to not have to worry about the act of sex when all you want is the experience of beauty or sexiness, which art can provide. A fetish isn't always the same as sexual desire, so in addition to having low or nonexistent interest in real life sex, someone with a fetish can at the same time like the concept of a girl burping really loudly, for instance. That doesn't mean that person will want to sleep with every or even any girl they've met who has burped really loudly at them (all zero-to-one-or-two of them, I imagine, given societal etiquette). Among other things, fetish art can be a safe and comfortable way for people to express what they find attractive when they don't feel able or inclined to explore their sexuality with real people. So TL;DR, people who identify as ace can have sexual fetishes and even see characters as sexy while at the same time exploring what it means to be asexual, or what being asexual means to them. 

Let's circle back now to where I started this detour: Abby in a hoodie and sweats. Yeah, I know that was a long detour. I appreciate you sticking with me on it, or just scrolling down until you saw the word Abby again. Let's resume.

As a character, Abby is a lot more strictly ace than I am. She isn't aromantic (she can feel love or romantic and aesthetic attraction toward people), but she also isn't demisexual, or interested in sex for any reasons at all. She's not offended by the idea, but it's not for her, and she has better shit to do with her time. Ironic, then, that she runs and jumps and hookshots all over the place in a shortass dress all the time, isn't it? Well, sort of. 

Despite not caring or thinking much about sex, Abby does still like to dress in ways that make her feel cute or 'sexy', though not always. Sometimes, her customized X-crew uniform isn't worth the hassle. Sometimes, it's cold as shit outside and walking around looking like a babe is a terrible idea. Sometimes, Abby desires the cozy vibe, or she just wants to disappear into her outfit until she can go back to bed. And sometimes, when she's actually paying attention, she gets a little tired of being ogled by passerbys and acquaintances, and she rails internally against the powers that be for defining what is and isn't 'sexy'. The man for whom she is semi-awkwardly employed as a special military agent can't tell her what to do, man! And so the uniform earns a well-deserved day off. On days like this, what's an Abby to do? You already know the answer. Hoodie and sweats: the best a nyan can get.

That's really the crux of why I wanted to do a hoodie and sweatpants sessions: I feel that having Abby be dressed the way she is all the time doesn't do justice to who she is as a person. It doesn't scream asexual, nor does it suggest she sometimes feels more like dressing loose and comfy. Granted, is Abby's asexuality a vital facet of her character that needs to be represented? That's a matter of opinion, but personally I think so. As for the large, exposed belly, at first I worried that it defeated the entire point of putting Abby in loose clothes, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn't at all out of character for her even given her reasons for dressing loose. Abby may occasionally get self-conscious or tired of dressing sexy, but I doubt she has ever gotten self-conscious about eating herself into enormity, in public or otherwise. Even in the Axuverse, where that kind of gluttony is much, much more commonplace, it still isn't considered the norm to find it attractive or even sexy. Shocking and horrifying, maybe, but as a gas guzzling, electricity-storing, super-strong, genetically engineered catgirl, Abby's always been more or less indifferent to those sorts of looks. Plus, if Abby has to choose between concealing her belly and eating as much as she wants, you can bet she'll choose the second option each and every time. Girl has her priorities.

But as you've undoubtedly gathered by this point, I'm just lying to everyone including myself by bringing in Abby's sexual identity as the reason for this session's theme. The real reason, of course, is so that we can all look at these images and go hey hey hey, fat Abby. There, glad I got that one off my chest.

Oh, the image generation process? Yeah, yeah, it was chill. As mentioned above, NovelAI just seems to get Abby (excluding the also aforementioned times when it really, really doesn't seem to get Abby at all.) Like with Amber, I spent a little more time at the 0.7 mark on the strength slider since, like with Amber, I like how the thicker lines and flat colours suit Abby's character. Ultimately though, I tried a range of strength settings to see how they handled tags such as 'spray paint', 'sunglasses', 'graffiti', and so on. It seems based on the generations I tried that 0.7 results in more dynamic graffiti, but couching that tag in other similar tags might help achieve similar results at higher strength settings. Results inconclusive; more Jet Set Abby needed.

One final note on this specific process is that NovelAI ended up colouring Abby's bangs a lot throughout, which I was ok with because it ended up fitting the subject matter perfectly. Abby with spraypaint means two things: one, she's going to get it in her hair; and two, she's going to eat a lot of it, though I guess that second point is unrelated.