My Experience with the Newly Introduced Cosmetic Studio (Updated)

Decided to give the Cosmetic Studio a try and have started with three cosmetics, being two Badges and one Frame. All three are available for resale by others and all three are based on original vector images that had been previously created. The cover image is one of the two Badges made.

As for the experience using the Cosmetic Studio, it is great that it does allow for some extra personalisation and the ability to use Green Buzz to make them is fantastic for someone like me who otherwise mostly only does NSFW stuff.

Best of all is that this enables me to use Green Buzz to create something that gets Yellow Buzz. Just while writing this right after publishing the shop, there were two actual sales, so at least in this case it wasn't just a potential to get some amount of Yellow Buzz, but actually getting some.

UPDATE: Although doing it right can take quite a lot of Blue Buzz, cosmetics can actually sell enough to make it worth well over time. Between August 5th and August 11th I've earnt 4,025 Yellow Buzz and 20,125 Blue Buzz. It's not yet a 'profit' but it could get there in just a few weeks and because most of Buzz spent making the cosmetics where in Green Buzz, it feels like a profit because for me, Green Buzz is mostly useless where the Blue Buzz and especially Yellow Buzz is a lot more useful.

So, yeah, that feels real good and provides a genuine incentive to do more in future.

There are some downsides to the Creator Studio. If there is a way to pick what type of Buzz is used it isn't intuitive to find this. It defaulted to using Blue Buzz and then goes to Green Buzz with Yellow Buzz being last. That is far better than Yellow Buzz not being last, but for anyone who has paid for a Membership to use Blue Buzz for NSFW generation, not being able to pick Green Buzz to be used first is a bit of a pain.

The general interface works fine, especially for anything static. If you want to adjust the size of a design for a badge to better fit within the frame, specifing the change in a percentage is naturally a lot more reliable than something more general, like 'make the design smaller'.

Another big downside is that creating Animated Badges is far more difficult, at least to a newcomer, than the static variety. Getting a proper loop is difficult and can take a lot of luck. There isn't a feature to convert an uploaded MP4 video into the accepted WEBP format with appropriate transparent backgrounds, which would also make things a lot easier.

UPDATE: So from doing more stuff I've learned two really important things that make it so much easier to do Animated Badges: things work much better if you don't just stick to the tools available on Civitai and animated PNGs are supported.

I've found that the technical issues I've gotten using animated webp disappears if you instead upload animated PNGs. Whatever was caused the reloading and flashing is resolved by switching to a different file format.

EXTRA UPDATE:
The free online Animated PNG Maker from ezgif is really useful. The Civitai Creator Studio is not good at reliably making smooth loops. The issue with video editing programs is that they may not support exporting into .apng format with transparent backgrounds.

Animated PNG Maker allows for edited videos to be exported as an image sequence which can then be uploaded and turned into an animated PNG with a transparent background. It can also be further modified as needed, such as to adjust the animation speed.