Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 14

Y’know, for a gal who only got into this game to meet a boy, Our Mighty Crushing Crusher has really gotten into it. Anyway, Our Scrappy Heroes keep the wolf at bay long enough for The Big Finish, and their reward is… sorry, princess, the wizard’s in another castle. (classical reference)

Verdict: they did still win the fight, they got a new quest, they all got to see her big spell go off, and most importantly, she achieved her Maiden Victory.

(now if only she’d get some high-level armor…)

Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army, episode 3

So, feeding the redhead tasty food blows her clothes off? I have a cunning plan…

Anyway, she’s working both sides of the tsundere trope really hard this week, but she’s got it so bad that she even bonds with Our Tasty Private Ogress Secretary. And then he trips another flag with an accidental marriage proposal, while Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal spies from afar.

Verdict: this is leaning a little hard into the First Girl Is Best Girl trope, especially given the quality of the alternatives we’ve already seen, but otherwise it’s amusing fluff, and the explanation of why demon gals go around half-naked sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

(I’m sure there are beaches and hot springs in this world for Our Hero to investigate…)

“Uncensored”, huh?

During the post-meeting chat at Friday’s Zoom meeting, people were joshing with the presenter about the AI-sourced art on his slides, and it turned into a more general discussion of offline AI, and I mentioned a few of my SFW experiments.

A co-worker messaged me later about his frustration trying to generate some simple, straightforward RPG art: a dying orc on a battlefield with a sword through his chest. He was using a Flux model, which is The New Hotness (and can produce very detailed, textured pics), and no matter how he prompted it, the sword always ended up pointing in a safe, non-violent direction.

You could carefully arrange every element except the stabby bit. This didn’t surprise me in an official model with strong guardrails that hadn’t been trained on violent content, but surely there was a derivative model or LoRA that would do it? TL/DR: if there is, I couldn’t find it on CivitAI. Other sorts of objects, IYKWIMAITYD, can be inserted into bodies in “uncensored” Flux models, but not weapons.

But Flux is new, and apparently harder to train. So I wrote a likely prompt and fed it to the full set of SDXL-based models I have that all take similar parameters (~60 of them; this sort of X/Y/Z comparison grid is a one-click operation in SwarmUI). Most of them produced something that looked like it came out of an orc bodybuilding magazine (with the usual repetition from related models), a few produced images where the pose and point of insertion suggested that the swords were blunt and capable of vibration, but one lonely model reliably produced the desired effect.

Prompt: realistic ((photograph)) of a male orc warrior, wearing armor, ((on his back)), ((dead)), ((eyes closed)), on a battlefield, ((stabbed through the chest)) with a sword, full body, at night, side view. 4k, crisp, highly detailed, intricate, ultra textured.

The model that killed orcs most reliably was Nova Furry XL (NSFW). Despite the name, it doesn’t spontaneously furritize everything you make, but it is very porny, so don’t click that link anywhere near a work environment.

The next step was to try to coax a more realistic model to improve that picture to add details and texture. I tinkered with SwarmUI’s img2img and refinement workflows, but the moment I adjusted the sliders enough to get Flux to produce its signature details and textures, the sword stopped stabbing. Most other models proved only slightly less annoying to work with, but I did manage one success with Crystal Clear XL and sent it to my co-worker:

Nova and Crystal Clear both have other models that might produce something more detailed or realistic, so I’m downloading them to try out later.

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