Crow's Monster/Deformed character guide

[undone steppe]

I will be working on this slowly and not all at once since people apparently want this. I'll try to simplify things and update it somewhat regularly until it's finished.

[undone steppe]

There are a number of things to consider when making a monster/deformed character, but the first thing to start with is the rough shape of the character you want.
If it helps, think of these shapes as something like skeletons. I would say they mostly fall into the following categories:

1boy
1girl (1boy or 1girl being for human shaped monsters, I would recommend 1girl over 1boy in most instances though since I believe there are more shape options)
Monster (sort of affects everything but works very well when used by itself)
Monster girl (e.g. lamias or other such distinctly female looking characters with monster features
Animal (for when you want your monster to be shaped like an animal)
Creature (for when you want it to be non-human and not shaped like any particular animal, this can also be useful for creatures shaped like things which are not animals, like fruit or vegetables)
Furry male
Furry Female (Furry prompts can be useful even for characters which are not furries, such as xenomorphs.)
Taur (for an upper body that is human but a lower body that is some other creature)

These prompts will form the rough shape of your character. If you, for example, choose 1girl, it will favor a feminine human form even if you prompt for distinctly non-human features.

(If I'm forgetting one I will try to add it later).

Some of these things can also be combined in the creation of a monster or deformed character, as in the linked image. which is a combination of taur with monster

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1464088399429505034/1464164453862866977/0120001-niking_Liu_Liaoliao_yugo_yugotme97-SIH.png

[undone steppe]

Some examples of different shapes

@little perch @azure wedge @noble light if any of you are interested Aha wanted me to compile like a mini-guide on how to make monstrous/deformed characters

[little perch]

apfel

[noble light]

that’s super useful

[undone steppe]

After you have chosen your rough shape, the next thing you need to consider is individual bodyparts. Specifically what the character will lack, and what it will have an excess amount of.

So for example, is your monster blind? no eyes can help
Is your monster possessed of huge hands? oversized hands can help, and in fact pairing "oversized" with various bodyparts might help increase the size of other things as well
Does your creature have longer than normal limbs? "Long legs" can help. Likewise you can turn these effects' weight up as well.

I won't list all of the different kinds of individual bodyparts because it would be somewhat difficult to gather them all, but some things worth keeping in mind are

No eyes
No face
No feet
(pairing no with individual body parts for often works for removing the thing from the generation)

Oversized hands
huge hands
large hands
(pairing oversized, huge, or large with individual body parts very often exaggerates their proportions

Tentacle hair
Animal hands
Animal head
Animal legs
Animal feet
Claws

Long legs (if this doesn't work one can turn the weight up to exaggerate it more)
long neck
etc.

Extra arms
Extra legs

robot joints
doll joints

skeletal wings
membranous wings

reverse-jointed legs

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1464088399429505034/1464158049856917640/0119001-niking_Liu_Liaoliao_yugo_yugotme97-SIH.png

@fresh topaz I'll add you to the thread so you can know when it's updated

[undone steppe]

In addition to individual bodypart prompts, there are also more abstract prompts which affect the entire character. There are a variety of these, but these are some notes I took about ones I was aware of.

Character doll (works)
Clothing transformation (doesn't work)
Foodification (doesn't work)
Furrification (works)
Humanization (for anthropomorphic characters to appear more human)
Kemonomimi mode (works)
Mechanization (works)
Monsterification (Works)
Objectification (works at higher weight)
Personification (Works)
Petrification (Works)
Slimification (Works)
Vehicalization (doesn't work)
Zombification (doesn't work)```

In addition to these there is also the ```fusion``` prompt, which can be used to combine concepts which would normally be separate in generation's result.

Some of these prompts can be used to help affect how other concepts manifest in the generation. For example, if you prompt for a skull mask and mechanization, chances are the mask will look more machine-like.

[undone steppe]

Something else which may be helpful to consider are height and size related prompts. These can be useful for determining a character or monster's relative size.

tall male
tall female
giant
giantess
giant male
giant monster
kaiju
petite
shortstack
mini person
minigirl
Miniboy
oversized animal
undersized animal
oversized object (can help force a relative perspective in an image, such as making a character look smaller by placing them next to an oversized book)
oversized limbs (already mentioned in a previous post more or less)
height difference
size difference
chibi
chibikemo (useful for non-humanoid chibis, may need a higher weight)

[undone steppe]

@noble light @little perch @astral fog there you go, I think that's probably enough for now and I'm not sure if there's much more to include. I didn't include a comprehensive list of all related prompts because I never really organized them but if I think of anything I'll try to add some mention or whatever

[undone steppe]

Also if you have some questions or whatever or want to achieve a specific result you can ask here and I can try to figure out if I have some idea of how to achieve something

[undone steppe]

actually I just remembered one other thing I could probably include

[astral fog]

nice

[undone steppe]

On the bodypart end of things, it is possible to affect things like either skin texture or individual body part features.

One can, for example, sometimes produce a skeletal bodypart on an otherwise fleshy character. Likewise one can produce skin with various textures like crystal or what have you.

I do not have a comprehensive list as a lot of them are not official tags, but I will attach some example images.

[noble light]

lava skin is cool

[undone steppe]

there are a good chunk of other textures that work but which aren't real tags

[noble light]

i noticed this sort of thing depends a lot on model

[undone steppe]

like these

[noble light]

like how willing is it not to render std pink skin etc

we prolly getting some e621 data in there in noob

[undone steppe]

probably depends more on the artist than the model with noob stuff

some artists just won't give certain skin details because of the way they draw skin

some stuff you're just able to force with weight and improvisation @noble light

"print" is also very useful for skin alteration

[noble light]

peeking thru shirt fabric texture peak

[undone steppe]

"galaxy skin"

[noble light]

yeah cool

[undone steppe]

i just forced the background to be white in this image

[noble light]

yeah i wanna see if i can reproduce, but doubt it, i’ve wanked my models so hard they’re basically different base

[undone steppe]

try different artists

usually the ones with shiny skin are better at that kind of thing

[noble light]

hmm good tip

[undone steppe]

when you're dealing with more flat color artists they tend to leave out details on things like legs and arms and such

also if you find an artist that has a wide variety of anatomy samples it can be useful too

it's one of the reasons I use Harada Takehito, because he has like literally over a thousand different pieces of art with characters of various shapes and sizes

https://tenor.com/view/etna-disgaea-prinny-violence-stab-gif-13305661191056392385

[sour blaze]

See-through slime girl, that is all xD

Most models just flat out refuse

[undone steppe]

i've done a see-through glass woman before

never really tried with a slime girl though

gimme a bit

glass lady

[sour blaze]

Yea glass is doable, ghost obviously, formless female (basically just body outline clothes) sure, transparent slime girl tho, hard af 🤣

[undone steppe]

if you mean completely color neutral eh

lemme try something

[sour blaze]

Yea basic slime girl is doable with any model

Transparent tho, with background behind, that's hard

[undone steppe]

one of the problems with transparency on a character is the issue of it not being equally transparent all over

so like you might have a body or hair that's see-through but not a face

it depends on things like segment editors too

[sour blaze]

Yea so it's a conflict prompt

[undone steppe]

or adetailer or whatever you want to call it

[undone steppe]

sometimes it can be resolved with things like "Transparent face"

it depends on what prompts you're working with though

[sour blaze]

Ie: u have to define the skin to get transparency over the entire body but by defining the skin u also make it solid in color

[undone steppe]

also sometimes you need to pick the right art style

some of them simply won't have transparency details of any kind

some will handle them with zero issue

sometimes you need to prompt for a skin color to make it look like a material

e.g. blue skin sometimes helps with ice textures

[undone steppe]

here you go

[sour blaze]

Problem with that is there's really only 2 types in the data

Blue or green xD

[undone steppe]

fully transparent isn't something I know how to manage, but transparency of extremities or possible

part of that comes down to being able to figure out a good contrast between foreground and background though

an attempt I didn't link earlier was this for example, and while it's possible the character is transparent I didn't specify enough background color to know

[sour blaze]

Na full solid

Black slime girl transparent is actually impossible

[undone steppe]

i meant like it made the character look black over a black background

[sour blaze]

The best 1.5 models even needed a specific lora and artist combo to do it

[undone steppe]

if I had specified red throne, as I did in later prompts, it would have been potentially a different result

[sour blaze]

Ah right right u could optical illusion I guess

[undone steppe]

also some artist mixes only want certain things to look transparent

like here the hair's perfectly transparent looking

it even looks like you can see the character's scalp under it

but the character's skin itself

[sour blaze]

More jellyfish than slime girl kek

But no that's the level of transparency I've been trying to do for an age

[undone steppe]

So did that help at all? If so a lot of that sort of thing comes down to picking the right artist, pigeon666 is really good at surface details like that

[sour blaze]

Yea gives me a few ideas,

Still involves tricking the model tho

[undone steppe]

you should be able to view metadata for those images too by the way

[undone steppe]

pigeon666, Liu Liaoliao, Solo, 1girl, slime girl, see-through body, see-through face, see-through hair, black dress, red throne, transparent skin,

[sour blaze]

Closest so far

[undone steppe]

that's basically what you have to do with tags that aren't actual booru tags

you have to basically figure out how to negotiate with the model's quirks

[sour blaze]

It is tho, but again this is one of those hard conflict prompts

[undone steppe]

but as a general trend, transparency is a high detail texture, which means you need something that includes a lot of detail on skin

for an art style I mean

so when you're shopping around for an art style you need something that has lots of shine and/or detail on skin usually

if you use a lower definition art style you get stuff like this

[sour blaze]

Can also work with the conflict prompts ie: translucent and transparent

[undone steppe]

vs this

[sour blaze]

Illust and noob understand both

One is for cloths the other is for skin/background

[undone steppe]

anyway hope that helps

[sour blaze]

It does ty

[undone steppe]

oh right, one other thing, I sorta touched on it earlier but it can be really helpful depending on what you're trying to make something look like - if you have a specific texture in mind you're trying to project onto a character's skin, sometimes you basically have to specify a skin color that looks like the thing you're wanting to achieve. So like if you want a transparent character who looks like they're made out of ice instead of slime, you might want blue skin or white skin, as opposed to just not specifying a skincolor. This goes for other weird textures too if you can get them to work. I wouldn't say "do this first" but rather if what you try first doesn't work, try making this kind of change and see if it helps.

[sour blaze]

Of note silhouette or shadow stuffs might be a good tie in

[undone steppe]

Some fake skin textures also might require you to specify the background, so like "galaxy" tends to splatter a galaxy texture all over the image, but if you specify a contrasting background (e.g. "white background") you can restrict the texture to specific parts of an image

so like that's what I did with this image I linked earlier

if I hadn't specified white background the background would look like space too

[sour blaze]

Interesting yea, could also work with a low weight semi transparent texture to give it the initial impression? 🤔

[undone steppe]

oh and depending on the model and if you make good use of color contrast, you're basically dividing parts of the character and image into things the model can keep separate more easily, which you can use to restrict textures to specific parts of the body

so like here for example I have a mostly solid girl with slime arms

but I specified 'slime arm' and 'blue arm'

and "red skin"

[sour blaze]

Yea that's neat

Definitely gonna mess with that specifically

Tho harpy's don't really need any help xD

[undone steppe]

another example but this time with crystal arms instead of slime

it's just when you want to screw with things like this you mostly need to give the model opportunity to make its own dividing line between your target and the areas which are not your target

this one's a little mangled but you get the idea

[sour blaze]

Interesting way to force segmentation tho 👍

[undone steppe]

oh and also a lot of stuff that works on skin sometimes works on hair too

it depends though

that can be something else to play around with when you feel like it

e.g. lava hair

[sour blaze]

Yea hairs interesting cause Medusa type stuffs xD

Kinda a pain to get the style u want tho

Just cause there's too many styles of hair 🤣

[undone steppe]

here's a good example of the color making a difference with whether or not the fake texture works though

I was trying to make "crystal hair"

but with red hair it mostly didn't work

but when I prompted "blue hair" it worked

[sour blaze]

Yea that's what I was saying with slime girl earlier

Blue or green has waaay more solid than transparent

So just by specifing the color ur reducing transparency

[undone steppe]

Ye

[undone steppe]

@copper escarp @lapis kettle @thick drift if any of you are interested I threw together a monster/deformed character guide, I pinned most of the walkthrough posts

[tardy solar]

I really like

[undone steppe]

@idle flame @paper sedge @sharp dock @tight bone

[sharp dock]

thank you 🙏 🙏

[undone steppe]

As an added note about "fusion" it seems capable of helping with projecting fake textures onto clothes as well, here I tried combining seashells, clam shells and armor, as well as "pearl trim" and it appears to have worked very well.

[undone steppe]

@woven sinew

if you're interested in unofficial tags that somehow work

there were a few discussed here anyway

[woven sinew]

Thanks, I'll take a look

[undone steppe]

the skin and body part effects here were mostly ones that aren't official tags but worked @woven sinew

should be able to right click on them >apps >view parameters

[woven sinew]

Oh cool thanks, I didn't even know you could do that lol

[undone steppe]

hmm

apparently it's only displaying one at a time

[undone steppe]

there was also this

[woven sinew]

thats neat might try to use the seashell armor when making a aquatic character

[undone steppe]

might be a thing that works better with some art styles than others

[undone steppe]

@dull lagoon also I don't know if you're interested but I made a guide on making deformed and/or monstrous characters

older AI models sorta sucked at making monsters

might be something you'd find fun to play around with

[dull lagoon]

interesting ooo

[undone steppe]

Anatomical nonsense is something that can be useful some of the time

[tiny ermine]

I am also on a quest to manage that

I think I saw you on minthy server before

Can I DM? Most pics end up NSFW so ^^°

https://civitai.com/models/1188467?modelVersionId=1515245 I got most of my consistency from using this LoRA

But there's still an alternate path that I don't know how to replicate :c

[sour blaze]

Has to do with the data and relevant tags

Not only are u trying to power through a hard tag conflict, ur also trying to pull from a very small subset of "monster girl"

[tiny ermine]

Yeah, if you check out the LoRA, it actually actively dissuades you from using slime girl

Using translucent X instead

Unfortunately translucent face still doesn't really work

[sour blaze]

• the natural problems sdxl has with transparency in general

Tldr: it's a 3 layered problem 🤣

[tiny ermine]

I really hope Anima will fix it all

u.u

[sour blaze]

Na it will lack the data + tag + supporting transparency understanding

In 1.5 we literally had ckpts dedicated to monster girl to solve this specific problem and of those only the very late 1.5 vpreds could do it perfectly

[sour blaze]

Is a very fundamental problem, that's why none of the loras can do it perfectly

[tiny ermine]

I mean from what I can see, transparency is doable with Anima

Wait

What 1.5 vpreds can do transparent slime girls

[sour blaze]

Ezfluff iirc

[tiny ermine]

I didn't even know there were SD 1.5 vpreds

[sour blaze]

With hll "patch"

[sour blaze]

1.5 vpreds are technically the only correct vpreds (thanks to every single sdxl model forgetting about ztsnr)

[tiny ermine]

Do you have a link for both?

I can't find it

[sour blaze]

Took a min to dig through old bookmarks kek

https://rentry.org/5exa3

That was/is the best of 1.5 models

[tiny ermine]

Honestly it looks awesome

I'll try it out later

[sour blaze]

You'll need that one comfyui node to properly use it btw

Cause it's actual vpred/ztsnr

Also the vae they mention

[undone steppe]

@chilly flower i know you were mostly looking for art styles, but if you're interested at all in characters with bizarre anatomy and how to use it, i wrote this thread a while back

[undone steppe]

@sweet tiger

[undone steppe]

@true trail maybe you'd be interested in this thread

it's an older one but a lot of it should still work fine in anima

[true trail]

already following 🫡

[undone steppe]

I didn't see you in the user list so I just figured