Generating an AI picture to match a reference, documented
Since there's a bunch of discussion of how much control over AI is there, what it works like, how much it costs, I just collected some data that can be referenced later to have more grounded arguments.
This is not intended to be any kind of masterpiece or specially designed test. I got into a discussion, made a thing for it, and the bits and pieces were still lying around afterwards, so why not post them?
I made this picture to try and match a reference from this discussion. The main point of it was to try to demonstrate that given a specific design, one can approach it quite closely without very much work. I stopped at the point I did mostly due to having other things to do and figuring the point was made well enough, but one could get closer to the model image without much trouble.
In this area I consider myself still a novice. I like AI, but it's one of my many hobbies, so I don't dedicate myself to it with any kind of seriousness. A more skilled person could do much better. So I'd say this is a benchmark indicating how a person decently familiar with the tools but not dedicated to mastering them performs.
It would have been nice to have controlnet come up as part of the process, but it wasn't used for this one.
The picture was generated in 32 steps which can be seen in the gallery.
- I used the Pony model with the Kobold LoRA
- I first tried using an IP adapter on the reference image, that didn't work so was removed, and I just started altering parts of the image one by one to match the reference.
- Parts were recolored to match the reference.
- Various bits were masked and inpainted: belt buckle, pouch, horns, legs, face, hands, feet.
- Regional prompting was used to color the snout specifically.
- Hands and feet were fixed up a bit.
- Shirt sleeve was extended.
According to my logs:
- Total number of generations for the entire process: 352
- Total GPU/CPU computation time: 2534 seconds (42 minutes)
- Total power consumed: At around 300W during generation, 0.21 KWh
- Total cost of power for the entire process, at 15 cents/KWh: $0.031
- Estimated time spent: Around 15-20 minutes, I was doing other things during the longer parts of the generation process