King Charles I

[Charley]

Stable Diffusion takes ages due to the slowness of my system so I just used DALLE 3 for the last couple. I've trried out a few. Stable Diffusion is still the best, IMO; if you have the patience and don't mind the odd crash or freeze. I suppose if I had a better system, it'd run more smoothly.

[Charley]

@architector Thank you! 🙂

[Frank21]

Stable Diffusion, even with Flux on Forge, is stable for me and has never crashed/froze. I always render low at 512 x 768 and if I like it I'll then use HiRez fix on the seed with hand/face Adetailer applied.
This lora I got yesterday works nicely and reminds me of Hammock - Mono No Aware.

[Legolas18]

Well, from what I have seen, local images really gets good only with Ultimate SD Upscaler, especially with Flux. I mean the improvement is just incredible, although quite heavy on the PC.

[Charley]

@Frank22 My Pc is a refurbished Dell; Win 10, Intel i5 Core, with a pathetic GTX 1050, I bought it all from Microchoice UK a few years back for £600 odd. Even with large scenes in Daz, I have to reduce resolution and use Scene Optimizer to stop the render from freezing the computer. It's the same with Stable Diffusion; and it takes forever. Blender has the same effect; if not worse. However, Marvelous Designer, ZBrush and Poser - surprisingly - run much better. I'm surprised it's lasting this long; as the guarantee was only for a year. And the internal HDD I'm using is the same drive that was in my old Median PC when I bought it back in 2012, and it's probably the healthiest part of the entire thing (an SSD with much less storage came with the PC, but I've never used it, as all my important stuff was on that HDD) It's the external drives that have given me the most problems. Like the one with my entire Daz library that died a couple of years back. Some of the older stuff, I'll probably never get back...

I do have a new laptop that I use for work, but it's just capable of doing what I need it for.

@Legolas18 What are your system specs?

[Legolas18]

@reinecarola Those specs are giving me PTSD 🙂

My specs are RTX3090, Ultrafast SSD m.2 5th gen, and Ryzen 7950x3D. It's quite a monster that I assembled a few months ago... Thankfully, I bought the 3090 before the AI craze back in 2020 so it was "cheap", but the new 5090 costs 2500$+ so maybe i'll grab one way into the future.

[Charley]

@Legolas18 Most people have a similar reaction when I tell them what I'm working with lol I have to get fairly creative with billboards and instancing if I want to create a big scene in Daz. Or, even at that, there are times when I have to pre render parts of a scene, then edit it all together in Photoshop, as if it was a photobash/collage

I love Stable Diffusion, but, if you want to make something half decent, it's really difficult with the system I've got.

It sounds like you have a real beast of a machine. Maybe, I'll treat myself at Christmas - depending on the state of finances - to something better.

[Frank21]

@legolas18 - I have Ultimate Upscaler and a few others but HiResFix gives me an image which is as big as I want it. IMO the Ultimate Upscaler tends to smooth out the details in my images. Note - I have a 4K monitor set to the recommended 150% scaling so my images end up slightly larger vertically than my screen. With 100% scaling they're much smaller on the screen.

@reinecarola - "...there are times when I have to pre render parts of a scene, then edit it all together in Photoshop". Yep I used to do that too with my old GPU.

[Charley]

@Frank22 I don't mind doing it, as I love working with Photoshop, but it increases the work you have to do if you forget to turn the ground shadow off when rendering a single, high res asset.

I think, though, having a lot of Photoshop experience helps - especially with the importance of lighting and colour grading. For me, lighting can make or break a scene.

Remember those old Poser renders from back in the day, when very few hobbiests cared about lighting. The scenes looked so bad - no matter how expensive the assets used. (And the old photomanips/photobashes were just as bad. Nothing was blended and everything looked so cut and pasted. I, too, was guilty of this when I first started out). lol

[Frank21]

Yeh the lighting was terrible before Cycles (Poser) and Iray in DS. I used to take my scenes into Vue or C4D just for the lighting.

[Legolas18]

@frank22
Ultimate SD Upscaler shouldn't smooth out anything, if anything it adds details. Perhaps are some settings you are using?

Here are my settings (CFG is set to 1 for Flux, in this case):

and I am using this model with it: 8x NMKD Superscale 150000 G

I have a 4K monitor set to the recommended 150% scaling so my images end up slightly larger vertically than my screen. With 100% scaling they're much smaller on the screen.

Well, if you are using Windows and using these images as a wallpaper, you should select the option "Fit Screen" to fix the issue. I am also using 150% scaling and I am having no issues whatsoever.

[Legolas18]

@reinecarola At least your settings put you in problem-solving mode. I love using photoshop to fix things, and whether it is with Daz images or AI, there is always some fixing to do.

As for my system, I tend to alternate upgrade it into two steps:
system only (no GPU) or GPU, since the GPU alone costs more than the PC nowadays, since for AI VRAM is king.

[Charley]

@Frank22 I created some awful crap when I started out with 3D - the Photoshop editing I needed to do was way more intensive and intricate than it is now - by then I'd been using Photoshop for a couple of years and had become more adept. That was back in 2009/2010 when there were two versions of Daz - Daz Standard, for free and Daz Pro for a price, before they scrapped the paid version and offered one free version to everyone. Until lately; that is. They've come full circle with both Genesis 9 and Daz Premier, both, it would seem, based on the original Genesis figure and Daz Studio Pro. I guess it's true when they say that, given time, everything comes back around again.

@Legolas18 I've always found Photoshop so relaxing, I could work - and have done - on a project for hours without a break. But, sometimes, I can be too much of a perfectionist and end up - what I consider - ruining the whole scene because I'm being nitpicky trying to iron out kinks that no one else seems to see. If you've ever watched the comedy Fr Ted, you'll remember there's an episode containing a scene, where he gets a dent in a car that he intends to raffle off to fix the roof. He gets a hammer to fix the dent and ends up destroying the car. That's me, sometimes with Photoshop, when I convince myself that something looks off. Lol

The price of a decent GPU is insane; almost makes my eyes water sometimes when I see the price tag.

[Frank21]

I need to apologise @legolas18. I now realise the upscaler I was talking about was 4x-UltraSharp and not Ultimate SD Upscaler.

As for nitpicky Charley, I think we have all reached the point many times where we think... "do I persist with fiddling around with this image or re-render a new one?"

And yes, that was one of the best Father Ted scenes. Also FT driving all night across the island asleep at the wheel with his arms folded... "almost drifted off for a moment". I think Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse is my favourite episode.

Father Purcell, the most boring priest in the world, was one of the best minor characters. I once knew someone exactly like that.

[Charley]

@frank22 I love Fr Ted! Kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse was great. Also, the one with the ''Lovely Girls'' contest and the very obvious Sinead O'Connor character AKA ''Niamh Connolly'', to whom Dougal sold the house.

This was one of the best scenes, but sadly, it didn't show the part where Ted tells Niamh Connolly: ''We're a very Progressive parish, sometimes he likes to do a sermon dressed as Joan Crawford'' - paraphrasing here, but it was hilarious. Also, I think we all know a Fr Purcell type, and a Fr Stone, and, to some degree, a Fr Noel Furlong. Another great was Fr Larry Duff. Ted always seemed to phone him at the worst time. The dancing priest was another minor character whose brief backstory I found funny: ''he danced all the way across America for peace and got mugged every fifteen miles.''
I don't think there was a single bad episode of Fr Ted. That and Fawlty Towers are my favourites. All the old Brit comedies were gold; they don't make them like they used to.

[Author]

Posts