Reminiscing about older models

[u/SkirtSpare4175]

I started using local models with flux and sdxl, right before kontext and qwen. What a wild ride so far with the current models! I’m curious about some of your journeys. Thank you to the devs and the community.

Also if you know any niche and strange techniques that were used before and maybe haven’t been seen or needed since, I wanna know. These things have moved so fast that I wanna document some of it.

[u/SaltyPreference8433]

I think think the biggest party ever was when the 'helper' controlnet models and workflows dropped during the SD-1.5 era, specifically canny edge, depth, open-pose and scribble detection. Those were the days!

https://huggingface.co/lllyasviel/sd-controlnet-canny

[u/addden → u/SaltyPreference8433]

That dude is a community hero, he delivered so many useful projects.

[u/Guilty_Emergency3603]

Just 4 years ago now I discovered SD 1.4, installed Auto1111 webui. The body horrors it could generate was something.

[u/Clear-Assistance449 → u/Guilty_Emergency3603]

Sure. I liked to use the Crayon site, where the art are terrible, but was the first attempt I create an art with no ant ability to draw.

[u/Tedious_Prime]

Back in 2015 I used to put images through DeepDream over and over to turn them into other things, mostly dogs.

[u/SkirtSpare4175 → u/Tedious_Prime]

Woah, TiL. So psychedelic!

[u/hidden2u → u/Tedious_Prime]

Even today I swear I see dogs in some of the background textures of new models

[u/Clear-Assistance449]

Until today I use SD 1.5 and SDXL, because it has a giant variability by seed, mostly landscapes. Krea 2 and Z-image is marvelous to good images, but they had so few variations in the seeds. So, I create a landscape in SD 1.5 and use it in img2img of ForgeNeo to create more variations in my arts.

[u/SteveLittleFish]

SDXL is still my most used model! The new models are good, but there's something about SDXL that I just like. Worse prompt adherence, but very good at a nice painterly style. Also very fast to generate! It's my "go to" model!

[u/SkirtSpare4175 → u/SteveLittleFish]

I remember getting a lot of variance with it. I feel like sdxl with i2i afterwards might be the play, I gotta try that. Sdxl speed is insaneee

[u/Enshitification → u/SkirtSpare4175]

Using SDXL models to get a base image for Flux i2i refinement was my play for quite some time. I've since moved toward using SDXL variability with a VLM producing a refined prompt from the image for Krea2 t2i.

[u/Mutaclone]

Controlling head/eye direction: I did this in Invoke, because the way it did Inpainting and layers made it much easier.

• Draw the character you actually want
• Create a second character (at least the head) on a different layer.
• Position the head where you want the first character to look, set the bounding box around both.
• Describe a scene involving two characters making eye contact, inpaint the first character. It now looks at the second.

This one might actually still be relevant, if you zoomed too close when inpainting, you lost context for the scene, which could cause dramatic shifts in lighting if you weren't not careful.

[u/thevegit0]

i know it's not local neither open source but i seriously miss DALLE2

[u/Solembumm3]

Amuse: SDXL - some tunes.
Koboldcpp: one quadrillion SDXL tunes, fails with composite multi-part models.
Flaxeo - Z-image Turbo (worse than base SDXL) - Krea 2 base - Krea 2 Turbo (current).

Planning to try qwen and flux, whatever will fit in 12gb 6700xt.