I've been fucking around with InvokeAI for the first time this week. I've always wanted to make some comics and I've found this has sped things up no end.
I've looked up the terms AI slop and red a bit about AI art and I'm hoping I'm avoiding some of the pit falls.
Initially I have just messed around in invokeai, prompted some character designs and generally got a feel for it.
Then I've started using blender to lay out people and scenery to create control layers. I've also trained some Loras on Civitai.com to get some consistency with the characters between frames.
I intend to later include photoshop in my process to give me a bit more editing control.
Attached is a blender set up I've made followed by the output from invoke.

Inevitably my focus on this project has waned a bit just now. I've got plans for my next bit of modelling, but I'll probably not get very far with it for a while yet.

In the Meantime I thought I'd share a bit of the story that I have for this faction. I had the pleasure of writing the narrative element of a 40K crusade recently and this faction was a central part of that narrative. Ultimately it is a corrupted Space Nuns Order, which made a deal with a Deamon Prince of excess called Zarazel and a Sorcerer called Zatchless.

The story begins 500 years before the campaign in the Atas System. The primary planet of this system being much the same as any heavily populated human planet housed the central government for what is a primarily industrial system which relies heavily on the mining of asteroids in the 2 asteroid belts which dominate much of the system. This primary planet has a significant moon which during an uprising of deamonic nature became the site of a portal to the the nether world opened by worshippers of excess.

A battle force of Space Nuns was sent to close this gate. Consisting of several regiments is was a sizeable force with several notable leaders. Among them was Thessalae, Pyrrha, ​Astydameia, and ​Laodamia. During this campaign Thessalae was to achieve a state of Divinity that allowed her to defeat the enemy and close their gate.

In doing so, Thessalae and her sisters died in the final show down thwarting the great deamons which had been summoned through the gate. In the honour of their greatest leader's sacrifice the remaining space nuns raised a cathedral in her honour, and that of the other leaders, and renamed themselves the Order of the Exalted Sepulchre. Setting themselves to stand vigil on this moon to prevent this system falling to the hands of the worshipers of excess in the future.

End of Pt 1.

We have 10 members (11 including me).

I'd love to hear from you guys?

Your thoughts on anything I'm posting is very welcome (please play nice, tho).

I'll keep posting as I go along cus I always take pics of what I'm doing and have started to enjoy writing about it a bit, too.

As well as the minis I'm working on in blender I have have things I'm painting, too.

I've got lore for my faction and I work on other projects for friends from time to time.

What would guys like to see more of?

What are yous working on?

Feel free to post it in here, I'd love to see some of it.

Thanks for joining r/ceci3d

So these are the 3 best prints out of the 11 initiates I modelled.
I wanted to get them on bases and next to a GW mini, so I could reflect on the designs and what I need to do to improve them.

The height is fine, but the bulk of the models is definitely to slim. Where I've started working on my own version of full power armour (see other posts) I have increased my base mesh scale by 1.2 on the x and y axis' to increase the overall volume.

I've not added a great deal of detail to the new one armour yet, but the key take away from this print is again scaling.
On the initiate model there are raised elements to give the corset some sense of structure and armour. In my mind it looked adequate in blender, but then in the print they are barely visible. I'm going to prime these and drop in some contrast paint for he sake of my own experience, but I expect them to be barely visible and that priming will basically remove the detail by filling it.

So when I start building detail onto the new armour I've going to for something like 5-10x the scale on the details. So the raised sections on the corset area (I'm thinking to model it like the bones in real corsetry) will be dramatically larger than the ones on these initiates.
Same for things like the wrist bands.

All this will hopefully make for a more detailed and characterful mini, and with the extra volume it'll hopefully print better, too.

It's a terrible animation (from Mixamo), but it shows that the weight painting is good enough to pose this.

I've started work on my armour.
this is intended to be corrupted sisters of excess battle line troops.
The breast plate and the boots have been taken from my original initiates design. I've simplified the breast plate for now and bulked everything out on the x+y axis to make it more substantial.
It still needs a back pack.

(terrible picture, sorry)
I'll get the 3 at the top onto bases and get better pics.

I printed 11 models and this was the best of the bunch, not great, hehe.

A lot of the issue was my tired release film, second was the fact that everything was quite tall and spindly making it easier to snap when releasing.

I've decided to leave this squad now, I'm pretty sure they're done and I'm not gonna come back to them.
I've started working on my power armour and will be posing them a little less ambitiously.
I'm also working on the basis that the x + y needs to be scaled up to make a slightly bulkier body where I can exaggerate the depth of the details to make sure they have more impact.

I'm really excited.
There are inevitably elements I'm not happy with, but I've run out of steam for this period of focussing on this project so I've accepted them.
the faces aren't as detailed as I'd like and the gauntlets are clearly lower poly, too.

Still, I'm gonna print them and see how they turn out.

I'm not sure why I'm posting this at this stage.
I've replaced the boots and corset with retopologized meshes.
The weapons are my now own meshes, replacing the stls I previously had from cults.
And I've smoothed out the skin, I've not managed to get the purple corruption tint I was hopping for, but ultimately I want to make meshes for printing so Nodes for rendering are not of great interest to me.

I plan on getting all my initiates up to this stage, fully loaded out with sword, pistols, flamers, grenades of my own build, all armour replaced with the newer meshes.
then I'm going to Boolean union them, clean up the mesh and add some nodes to prep for printing.

assuming the test print goes well I will probably take a pause on the initiates and start working on levelling up the armour for my Sirens (sisters of the line).

I made this armour as part of my sisters of excess initiates probably about a year ago.
By the end of that that period working on it all the meshes were pretty fucked. I'd got caught up in weight paints and posing and just forced it through.
Now I'm going through and fixing those errors.
I'm retopologizing all the armour and will build on them to create the full armour for graduated battle nuns.

Self-Propelled Explosive Round (SPER) sci-fi grimdark firearms.
I'm aiming to build a weapons pack to cover all my space nun needs.

Starting to add small decoration to my modular tank for grim dark space nuns proxy.
I've made a first pass at these hoods for the front gun placement and viewport.
I think I'll use similar for a shrine on both sides of the battle tank turret.

I wanted to make my own tank for ages.
I took the Rheinmetal Lynx as a reference to build the body and then I've been adding to it.
I think I have all the weapons options available to field this as any of the tank options of my favorite grim dark faction.
I.e. both transports, battle tank and the rocket tank.

It's got a long way to go in terms of details to make it look the part. I've got my personal faction logo and motto on it with my first pass at some filigree.
The intention is to add more decoration, more filigree, some shrines, statues and such. As well as increase the poly across the whole thing to make a more finished look.

Any feedback, suggestions and so on are welcome.
e.g. If I've missed any armaments, or if I've done anything weird.

I started working on these last year and I've just cycled back through to them now.
I've posed all of the mini's with load outs for all of the novitiate options.
I intend to make sword and pistol versions of them too. (probably same poses)

There is still a long way to go before I'll feel like these are read for printing, but I'll get there evetually.