-- v2 --

• Better facial variety

• Easier prompt aging

• General Improvements (there's a lot of little tweaks over v1)

• Better prompt adherence (not perfect at all... we're only at v2 here... keep the faith.)

-- v1 --

Boy this one was a PITA to train.

Because this was brought up in the comments, I'll post this here too:
It's been tough to dial some attributes in with the new Illustrious XL 1.0 release. I have been working on that. Illustrious was originally designed for anime/illustration where key distinguishing features of age are more related to physical size. Many anime characters have very similar faces - and so training for Illustrious 1.0 (link) has more challenges in (or at least more challenges for me) with:

1. Variety of faces
2. Dialing in Age
3. Things like blemishes, wrinkles, etc...
4. Masculine features (most anime characters - even male - tend to be more effeminate looking)

So this is definitely something that is going to take a few generations to dial in. I did have some success with getting aged appearances with A LOT of weighted prompts that described aged features - like wrinkles or scruffy-ness etc...

For this image, I added:

Old woman, grey hair, wrinkled face, glassy stare, very old, wise, wearing a sweater,

Noteworthy is the result of months of work trying to see if I could train Illustrious to do what I wanted. Illustrious is a bit of a bugger to train for (at least for me), it took longer than I thought. I did recompile my work for the Illustrious 1.0 base. (some of the original work was done on the 0.1 base). This is definitely a 1.0 version. There are things that I'm happy with and things that still bug me a little. I'm hoping the feedback I get from the community will help me dial this in for future versions.

It's important to know that Illustrious kind of has a "base face" and you have to prompt your way out of it. It also tends to be harder to prompt for male subjects. You'll have to wrestle with it a bit.

Things to know about Illustrious.

At least with the recent Illustrious 1.0 base, LoRAs can be a bit of a bugger to work with. I've tried to mitigate some of that with fine-tuning... but I'd keep in mind that LoRAs that were originally trained on the Illustrious 0.1 base, may take some extra arm-twisting to get results with. Illustrious is kind of notoriously difficult to work with on Realistic modeling and training, so keep that in mind. If you're just looking for the best realism, you're probably going to find that with SDXL. You can try my QuadPipe model or my MegaChonk models for that.

When it comes to settings for this one, I've had good results with a wide spectrum of CFG 3.5 - 18.5 have given different and solid results. It depends on your prompts of course.

I have found that going too heavy on prompt tags like:

high-quality
ultra-detail
etc...

These tags are probably aren't necessary and they definitely confine what it produces. Again, sometimes you have to twist its arm a bit, but you can get there. I did find that Negatives (especially media-type) give you an extra boost here on realism.

Check my prompts to learn about settings etc... but in general this is what I was using when I created the demos:

768x1152

CFG 3.5-18.5 (super wide, but also it follows prompts at higher CFG without going crazy)

4x_foolhardy_Remacri (upscaler)
30 hires steps

0.27 Denoising Strength

Upscale by 1.5

Sampler: DPM++ 2M SDE Heun

Schedule: Karras

Sampling Steps: 50