The younger me would support the piracy, the person I am now wants to support someone that takes their time to create high-quality resources. SMH

Seriously, you spend like a few hundred bucks extra on your electricity Bill for running generative AI at home but 1$ for a modell you obviously really want to use is too much?

It's only a 1 week wait, or $1. I'll pirate corporate software all day long, but not individual creators who probably barely make minimum wage.

@DucHaiten yeah nobody cares, It's programming in the end. You don't do hard physical work to cry.

@DucHaiten Being a content creator myself, I totally understand.

@DucHaiten don't cry baby

1$.... It seems like people become greedy and expect that everything has to be 4free.

Dev Greed and You Greed is the same. Don't blame.

@FullMetal1111 I don't use it and I'm not interested, but the one million caught my attention.

Please ignore the haters DucHaiten. Really appreciate your hard work.

@travahaka yes ignore them, great work anyway

Hehehee release it early I can use StableDiffusion. Cpp it is better optimized I can do 1024x1024 on termux android with that app but right now I'm testing forge ui but I can't use lora in forge but it's faster than comfyui. I can't wait till next Tuesday or Wednesday!!

Using version 2.0, I just posted an image with the "night" tag and that's all it took for me to be satisfied. It was indoors, so it had both cool moonlit tones in addition to warm candlelight. You may want to try Goddess of Realism if that's still not working for you. They're both great.

@redjoe23 thank you! I'll look closer into it maybe my Loras are messing around

@DucHaiten ok, found the issue, i had put 1girl, in the prompt area twice, my bad XD

the world mourns with you

Tell it to the judge, pervert!

@DucHaiten can't wait, your models are goated

I totally agree, please bring it back for onsite generation!

Hard Agree! This was my go-to

it felt too good to be true, and it was. and now we play the waiting game. again 😭

@Fluffplz yea back to that, hope u can give us updates like last time and give us hope some more lol, looks like im back to not generating for the time being unless i run out of my backlogs i have saved

@carly_ai haha I’ll mention anything I see here, and I’m happy if anything I did helped out. There are a few models still available that aren’t as good as this one imo, but still good, if you’re up for trying something different. I recommend doing a few gens with a prompt you know really well to try some new checkpoints, and to do it by choosing in the generator so it only shows the ones compatible with your loras. There aren’t THAT many for pony and some of the cover pics don’t do them justice.

@Fluffplz lol yea i had been using another that was just as close as this one so i will be going to that again for the time being, not gonna make much but better than nothing lol

It’s back! Get it while it lasts 😂

@Resi_Party rollarcoaster of emotions lol

@carly_ai Absolutely 😂

Welp... I've done my part. I don't expect it to last but we'll just have to see.

@Fluffplz i did it too just in case, but im asking the same thing myself, its always something

I usually wait until the last min and see what buzz I can spare. Thing is, a checkpoint being in the top 200 is more organic if you have 100 people throwing in 100 buzz rather than 1 bid dumping in 500k 🙄 That's not a sustainable approach no matter how much yellow buzz a checkpoint creator has.

As for lora creators, they hate the current situation for sure. It''s like the tariffs, unpredictability is intolerable when you need a stable lora training target.

@arrt i checked in the last hour for the most recent auction, and was able to get my other most used checkpoint in. I bid it up to spot 180ish and it fell 10 spots by the time auction closed. Still cost me over 5k buzz to do it. I'm hoping things settle more this week but I'm not holding my breath.

@arrt sorry for another reply, but a thought just occurred to me after looking at the current state of the auction. The whole point of the roll back was that the current servers couldn't handle something like 20k checkpoints, but if they allowed 500, they'd cover ever single checkpoint that has a bid on it currently, including all the ones at the bottom with 1 buzz bids. I have a tiny shred of hope that this auction is just a test to gauge interest and raise the limit.

Lowest winning bid this week was 10,001 buzz, roughly double what it was last week.

I'm bumping this thread to ask for help with buzz for the weekly auctions. I've been putting in 5k - 8k buzz each week and I can't really do that sustainably long term. Anything you could spare would be massively appreciated, and I'll do my best regardless to keep this checkpoint in the generator, both as my favorite of all time and as needed reference for all the amazing new models Duc has been coming out with recently. Just a reminder, auctions reset on Thursdays at 7pm CDT. I usually pop in a half hour before and bid it up to at least the 150th spot.

Putting some in too :) 3k this week

Me too 2k

I've put 10k in this week, it's very close the bidding

Probably not, and this isn't even the checkpoint's fault, it's Pony's fault. Base pony is very bad at drawing people who aren't white or asian, and thus all of its checkpoints are bad at it as well (some are a bit better, others are even worse).

Afaik the same issue exists with Illustrious and Noob-AI.

You need to either use a lora for that specific ethnicity or combine Pony checkpoints with SDXL checkpoints. You can have your favorite SDXL checkpoint generate an image with the correct ethnicity ad then use it in img2img or IP-Adapter with a Pony checkpoint, or have the SDXL checkpoint start to generate an image and then switch to Pony mid generation (I don't think these can be done in this site, though).

Thank you for detailed response. Appreciate the clarification

I've noticed that adding positive and negative prompts for skin tone can help, as well as prompting a fictional character of that ethnicity. If you don't want them to look exactly like that character, put the name lower in the prompt. Some names barely change anything, especially on realistic models, while some names change a lot, and they interact with loras differently, too. Here's a great write-up on the characters that pony recognizes.

I've been making sure it gets in, but I was at work this week and missed the auction deadline. If there are any model makers with buzz to spare, I could really use the help. It costs 10k a week to keep it available.

Fluffplz geez 10k? i put in last time like 100 or 1k i forgot but yea its ridculous, wish they just keep this one

You guys are awesome! I only realized today that the payment processor for buying buzz is down again, so I can’t even restock until it’s back.

Yeah, this checkpoint is a Must-Have. I spent a quite a few K buzz on it at the start of the bidding system. I haven't really touched the auction for recently as it just got too costly. I kinda thought and hoped it would be popular enough, and it sure has been mostly available since then. And yeah I've been in the three digits with buzz lately, as I don't do crypto stuff. Wish I could help it back, but not this time I fear.

UnstableCog I’ve been paying to keep it in since the auctions started, I think I’ve only missed it 2 or 3 times, including last week. But I have 51 yellow buzz right now and no way to buy more, so we’re gonna have to work together until it’s back. Bids have settled to the point where 10,200 is safe. Lots of people set a 10k auto bid, so that’s become a standard, to the point that a few buzz more puts you 30 to 50 spots higher, but 9,999 has a good chance of not making it in. Sorry for the rant, I just figured lots of people haven’t been watching the auctions without a good reason to, so I should share the insight I’ve gained.

Auction ends at reset in 2 hours, and this model needs about 7k buzz bid on it to go back in the generator. I still can’t buy buzz, or I’d have bid it up already. Bids look lower than usual overall, probably because the payments are still broken, but there’s no telling if that lasts until the auction closes. I’d still consider the lowest “safe” bid to be 10.2k

Yeah, I'm nowhere near any helpful amount of Buzz. :'(.

Fluffplz its never coming back (joke) i hope it comes back again, havent generated any new stuff in a week since it got taken down

you have to pay 10K to get it in? how does that work? genuine question, I'm not familiar with the creator side of the business model

ps- best lora hands down

@snugssorcery Each week, there's an auction that everyone bids on to decide which checkpoints are available to be used in the online generator. You can always download a checkpoint for local use. They used to have a list of 200 checkpoints that they chose, but creators kept making newer and better ones that couldn't be used in the generator. So they pivoted to using this auction system, which has its drawbacks, but at least gives us the option to make our favorites available... if we're willing to pay for it. I've been ensuring this checkpoint makes it in ever since, with a few exceptions, and the lowest winning bid has been hovering around 10K buzz for a while. So we went from no option to an expensive option. This week was especially rough because they knocked it down to A HUNDRED spots because they couldn't afford as many gpu's, so it cost me over 25K this week.

@Fluffplz thanks for the info. so I'm trying to understand the incentive structure here? what happens to the buzz from the bids that people make? this all goes to Civitai to pay for GPU? not to you presumably :( --so then what's your incentive? I've been trying to understand what they were thinking ever since they implemented the auctions

@snugssorcery Yes that buzz just goes back to civit. If the model you bid on doesn’t make it in, you get your buzz back. They wrote an article explaining how they pitched it back at launch, you could find it here on the site. I remember something about creative freedom and it’ll be a fun way to discover new models each week. That’s mostly marketing talk trying to sell the idea. One factor is that there are lots of creators, mostly model and lora creators, who have thousands, sometimes millions of buzz and nothing to spend it on. That’s the group that puts up huge bids (100K+) to grab the featured slots at the top. The rest are people like me who (for now) want to use their favorite checkpoint badly enough to pay extra for it. It’s been costing roughly $10 a WEEK to keep it, and I’m not making a time of money. I’ve considered local generation many times and probably will someday soon. I’m pretty sure only a handful of people even realized it costs anything because this model has been in there so consistently, until the buzz payments went down and I couldn’t do anything about it. So that’s the incentive for having the auctions; we went from having NO choice of checkpoint in the generator, to an expensive choice.

@Fluffplz gotcha. I usually avoid the announcements so I imagine I missed it. appreciate the detailed intel

Anyone willing to help me out with the auction this week?

@Fluffplz I've bid 1111 Bz now

I think the creators should receive at least some percentage of the bids on their model, (like minimum 33% of the amount of Bz bid by other users.)

Though I don't really like this auction system in general. It had some few promising aspects when it started. But it seems we just get the same few checkpoints as before, only much less of them. Maybe one new checkpoint here and there. I liked the few days we had access to almost every checkpoint on the site. I doubt they will ever attempt to work towards successfully offering that again, as this auction system clearly leeches so much currency from us users.

@UnstableCog It was a lesser evil when it first came out, and you’re right, I doubt they’ll ever go back with how much buzz gets dumped in there each week (though that could be a drop in the pan for all I know). Also, there’s a chance I’m wrong about where the buzz goes, that was based on memory from when they launched it and could have changed.

It is nice to watch certain models that get frequent revisions, like the cyber models, and being able to compare a few versions, but the creator of those models can afford to push through as many as he wants, and invites people to ask for versions they want. Most people can’t do that. I think MOST people don’t even know auctions are a thing until their favorite model disappears.

@UnstableCog and thanks for bidding it helps a ton ❤️

@Fluffplz Just saw the entry price. Twenty thousand+! Yikes, I was a fool to think the price would drop as time went by. hehe :/

@Fluffplz Yeah I do like the Cyber pony and XL models for their realism. This DucHaiten model is is my favorite though, it's much more PonyXL-y while keeping it as realistic capable as it can. And for more drawn-looking gens I prefer AutismMix_Confetti, but have not seen that one for some months. I don't use Illustrious too much, but I like the one by Klaabu, though it sometimes makes gibberish error images when used with some lyc/loras.

Cyber and some others often have multiple versions of their model available, I don't like that, cause I reckon each version still occupy a spot that an other model could have used.

@UnstableCog This model is the most artistic and most receptive to lora’s that I’ve found, and I’ve done quite a lot of testing. When it got locked away a few times, I was forced to learn a few other models, and found that a few can do a few things really well, but Duc’s does MOST things EXCEPTIONALLY well, with very little adjustments needed (though that could just be because I’m so familiar with it).

FFS! Sorry guys it got pushed down in last few seconds and I wasn’t watching closely enough. It was at spot 89 with 5 minutes to go and it finished at spot 102 😫

@Fluffplz its getting really difficult to even keep track

I've seen talk of big changes coming to the site soon, maybe being announced today, so there's no telling how things will look this time next week, at the next auction. I guess what I'm saying is, don't hold back. Enjoy this model and this generator while you can.

I've bid 1111 now, hope that helps. Been Hard not to have this model available lately. :'(

Just bid 2222, it's on 114th place. <3

I tried to again last night, but the auction page loaded slowly and froze my tab every time. Then the time ran out. :'(

damn i couldnt make it, i dont have enough

I realized they did this way too late, but I got it in.

@Fluffplz u really are the MVP!