The Rest: May 2023

Hello! Before you proceed, please take the time to note the folder containing 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.

Mallory Session #2 - Mid November 2022

This is the session that inspired this month's gallery theme. My goal with it was to capture Mallory's wild and dangerous side while hinting at her traumatic past as a laboratory experiment gone rogue. These are facets of her backstory that will be explored a bit in Axugaem2 once she's been properly introduced in-game, but for now the short of it is that she was a human girl that was experimented on illegally by researchers who wanted to make genetically engineered catgirls a reality. The process all but destroyed Mallory's faith in humanity, teaching her that she could only rely on herself. Fortunately for Mallory (and unfortunately for her captors), the experiment had the unintended consequence of giving her the skills necessary to not only survive but thrive on her own: the senses, reflexes, hunting prowess, and ruthlessness of a cat, along with a significant boost in physical strength and constitution thanks to reinforcements made to her DNA so that it could withstand being hybridized so dramatically. Upon realizing the powers she had gained, Mallory's first act was to turn on the researchers and release her fellow test subjects, leading to the destruction of the laboratory and the massacre of its staff. Having successfully escaped with a handful of surviving catgirls, Mallory led the group as a small gang for a few years before being discovered by a prestigious Bounty Hunters' College, which offered her a generous scholarship in exchange for her enrolment. The fate of the rest of Mallory's gang is unknown, but Mallory has insinuated that, due to mysterious and tragic circumstances, she is the lone survivor of it.

Mallory's talents as a bounty hunter are twofold: she knows her way around a firearm and is an excellent long range hunter, capable of clean kills and displaying impressive patience during the occasional long stakeout; but she is also violent, sadistic, and exceedingly ruthless when cornered, leading to bloody displays of aggression that remain forever carved into the minds of any who manage to survive them. Needless to say, her quarry of choice in both cases are almost always those who are exclusively Wanted: Dead.

Onto the image generation process for this session, let's start with the obvious. I used tags such as 'blood', 'blood splatter', 'blood on clothes', 'blood on face', 'blood on walls', and 'blood on floor' to try and get blood in as many different places as possible, with my intent being to imply the chaotic nature of Mallory's murderous outbursts. 'Red Background' and 'Red theme' were a pair of tags I used throughout the session, again, for obvious reasons. Tags I experimented with exclusively in this session include 'barbed wire', 'claw pose', 'laboratory', and 'monochrome'. You can see the effects of these tags to some extent throughout the resulting images, but it's worth noting that it took adding some black lines to the background image for the 'barbed wire' tag to really be effective, and similarly, I'm not entirely sure how much effect the 'laboratory' tag itself actually had on the background. 'Claw pose' worked very well and did what I expected it to, while 'monochrome' sometimes had an effect and sometimes did not, which ended up giving a nice variety to the results. In cases where the 'monochrome' tag did have an effect though, it wasn't the effect I'd expected: I had hoped it would make Mallory red like the background, but a lot of the time it ended up making her all white instead. Fortunately, the White Stripes were in fact onto something, because white, red, and black work great together, so that effect of the 'monochrome' tag ended up a happy accident.

Perhaps the most crucial tag for this imageset (aside from all the blood tags of course) was the 'crazy eyes' tag. Combined with the 'one eye closed', 'evil grin', and 'slit pupil' tags, this tag helped NovelAI absolutely nail what I consider the Mallory vibe: one eye open and looking unsettling af. This 'expression' is meant to reflect the sort of duality in Mallory's character that I mentioned above, where she is at times capable of being a charming and sociable professional, but one is still wise to always be on their guard around her due to what clearly lies just beneath that facade. We could call her a sociopath, but her more docile side seems a little more genuine than that, as she is capable of showing care and affection and even acting selflessly on very, very rare occasions, so let's be nice to her. She's been through some shite.

What I'm most proud of with this imageset is using a few tricks to great effect which I haven't been able to pull off elsewhere: lowering the 'guidance' significantly, and overenhancing images to create a grittier, murkier, and more deranged vibe. Guidance (which was renamed following an update to NovelAI's HUD, and sadly I'm drawing a blank on what it used to be called) is the degree to which NovelAI relies on your tags to generate the image. Lowering this value can result in more creative results, but in a more abstract and less coherent sense. Images 'mllr191' and 'mllr237' (which are both in the zip folder and directly attached to this post) are examples of images generated using very low guidance values: mllr191 was generated with a guidance value of 3, and mllr237 with a value of 5. For reference, the default guidance value for image generations used to be 11 and is now 20. Most imagesets I generate use a guidance value between 7 and 10, as I've found that to be somewhat of a sweet spot between creativity and consistency, but if you're looking to produce some ragged and unsettling looking results, setting guidance even lower than that can certainly get the job done.

Overenhancing images is an interesting and somewhat anla-intensive option that complements lower guidance values fairly well. The idea is to just keep enhancing the same chain of images until it becomes murky and a little noisy. Usually, I try to avoid doing this at all costs, but in the case of this imageset it provided a great means of making Mallory a lot more menacing. Compare attached images 'mllr241' and 'mllr241 4' for a direct example of what overenhancing an image can do to it. My favourite image from that specific chain of overenhancement is included as part of the main gallery for this month, and it's in contention for my favourite result from this entire session. I will be taking notes on what makes that image so unsettling for when it comes time to draw some creepy Mallory of my own in the future.

Renée Session #2 - Late January 2023

I don't have a ton to say about this imageset that I haven't already said about the previous Renée session, so I'll keep this brief: Renée is another character who has somewhat of a monstrous side, in this case due to her vampirism, which she self-medicates against during the day with a concerning quantity of coffee. At night, however, she's more of a wild card, capable of both reckless seduction and straight-up crimes of passion... kind of like Linda with a little less self-control and a little more self-hatred. Geez, that's a scary thought. This isn't to say that Renée is a straight up homicidal maniac at night though. It takes a pretty bad day for her to actually harm someone, but the powers that be in Costa Del Nyan still understandably don't like those odds, hence her perpetual state of house arrest.

With all that said, I don't think I went far enough with this session to properly convey Renée's darker side, so it's a subject I'll be returning to in future sessions. I'd like to try and incorporate some of the techniques I used in the second Mallory session (noted directly above this one) to give more of a hazy, psychological dimension to Renée's basement as a setting. I don't think it would fit to go quite as far as I did with Mallory, since Renée ultimately doesn't want to hurt anyone (and has thusfar done a pretty good job of avoiding it) and thus deserves to be portrayed a lot more sympathetically, but I do think the next imageset I try with her will lean just a bit heavier on the insanity meter, so to speak. I'm also hoping these techniques might better capture Renée's somewhat sallow skintone, which is difficult to do otherwise.

But hey, I'm not saying I dislike the results of this session. Given that these are pinups, and in this case the subject is a promiscuous big tiddy goth neko gf sitting on a bed in various states of undress, I'd have to have really screwed something up to get anything less than decent results there.

Ashley Session #2 - Late April 2023

The two Ashley sessions I've done thusfar have been divided between her two main outfits, both of which you can see in the attached reference. The first Ashley session I did featured her in her ninja outfit, the one on the left. This session featured her everyday wear, which has more of a gothic lolita theme. I started with the same settings as the first session, which weren't anything unusual compared to other sessions. After a few rounds of image generation, though, I took a break to research some style tags for NovelAI that might give the results more of a creepy, gothic atmosphere. I settled on the tag {{{{{{{beautiful rough sketch}}}}}}}, which is singlehandedly responsible for the sketchlike quality that permeates most of the session. 

Due to the rougher nature of the results, I decided to keep any post-generation editing to a minimum, save for edits to the face. Normally, when editing by hand, I focus on the face, hands, hair, and any other aspects of the image that don't look quite right. Not having to do that here allowed me to include more images from this session in the gallery without feeling like I was sacrificing quality. That said, it's not something I would do often, as I feel it only worked here due to the stylistic synergy the tag had with the subject matter.

Unlike with the Mallory imageset, I didn't mess much with the Guidance value here, as I didn't feel the results needed to be any less predictable. There wasn't much need for overenhancement either, as I didn't feel making the images any grittier made sense given their already sketchy quality. Also, Ashley as a character is a lot more even-keeled than Mallory or Renee, so I figured there was no need to add any extra crazy to the results here.

A few notes on some other tags I tried out for the first time with this session: 'mansion' and {{gothic architecture}} were two obvious choices that ended up pulling their weight throughout the session, particularly in the images featuring windows. 'Bangs pinned back' was a tag I somehow missed prior to the Ashley sessions, and I regret not emphasizing it more, as it did seem to help make Ashley's bangs more orderly in a lot of the results. And finally, I added the 'corset' tag to the prompt midway through this session, with excellent results. NovelAI knew immediately how to approach that tag in conjunction with the belly-related tags, leading to some very fun tummy shapes that I didn't expect the app to be able to pull off! More experimentation with this tag is needed, for research purposes, of course.

One final note regarding this session is that while working on it, I put on a playlist of old school goth music to serve as a soundtrack. If you're interested in an audio accompaniment to these images, search up the playlist 'actual goth music' on Spotify and hit shuffle. I'd say it's Ashley approved, but I doubt Ashley cares much about music, period. Then again, I doubt half of these images would be Ashley approved either, so if you're looking to share headspace with this fictional pseudo-vampire, maybe just look forward to the next Axu2 update instead, where there will be some opportunities to get to know her better as an individual. This imageset is largely fanservice by comparison.