This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
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Notes -
Currently I'm using Nano Banana Pro, which was the best model at the time I started the project. The more recently released GPT Image 2 is probably the better model overall now, but for what I'm trying to do, it has a few issues.
GPT's interpretation of "literary cross-hatching" style is more beautiful overall in isolation, using thin fine stippling, which gives it a really nice engraved look, especially for character sprites. Whereas Banano's style tends to use thicker lines and give a more exaggerated and perhaps less realistic overall appearance to characters. But even though style-wise Banano is the more amateurish one, I'd say its use of bolder/clearer lines with less detail makes it easier to more quickly understand what's going on, both in the backgrounds and in characters' expressions. So it wins from an information standpoint, even if less pretty.
Also: GPT seems to do a better job at following prompts details, like including everything you tell it to include. But, it seems to be worse at understanding how objects exist in space (or maybe it just screws up more often due to including more fine details), leading to more nonsensical elements in the backgrounds. (Banano does screw up physicality too, but less often.)
And I find it interesting that, no matter how I try to prompt the differences in style out of the models, even with style reference images, they really do just seem to have their own interpretations of cross-hatching that they can't help but converge to. (And that does make me a little worried that, should Google deprecate and replace Banano with a different model, the "upgrade" might have a fundamentally different style, which would lead to the website's art becoming inconsistent. But I'll figure out how to deal with that if it comes to it.)
And then the last weird about the GPT model is its bizarre fixation on cleavage. It can't help itself but to include prominent cleavage in all the female sprites, which... could be acceptable, were again, its art style not so distractingly detailed. But you end up with these perfectly spherical breasts contoured with perfect curve-following grids, which look like they belong in a calculus class. Beautiful! But distracting. (Banano is comparatively more modest, and also just does a better job diversifying its faces away from always being of the perfect form, which helps keeps characters identifiable at-a-glance.)
An approach several furry 'directors' have moved toward is initial generation in Nano Banana / GPT Image for general layout and primary characteristics, and then a quick IMG2IMG step is a more focused model applying LoRA or heavily style-focused guidance or using something natural-language-friendly like Qwen Image Edit. May be worth evaluating for this project if you're considering something much more semi-automated.
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It sounds like the training material was the 1992-2002 corpus of Image Comics.
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