2024-JUL-10

A TI (Textual Inversion) embedding to make decorative leather images with mixed media elements.

This one uses 8 tokens in your prompt. SDXL seems to have had a reasonable amount of crafting images related to quilting, embroidery, sewing and fabric art in its training set, but I’ve struggled to find consistent wording to create new images. So I thought I’d try making some TIs to leverage the existing content in a more consistent way. This TI should work with base SDXL and any checkpoints that are not too far away from the base.

Initial version, trained on base SDXL v1.0. This TI uses 8 vectors and is 33KB in size.

The trigger word is cs-l3ath3r, but you can change that simply by renaming the .safetensors file. If you do, try not to use a real word that SDXL already knows!

Simple prompts should give 2D applique-style results, complex prompts should give 3D diorama-style images.

Things to be aware of:

* By the nature of the target technique, images are simplified compared to prompting for photorealism.

* The TI often presents the image with a leather border or on a leather cushion even though there are very few such borders in the training images. I think this must be to do with the images SDXL was originally trained on.

* Even when the rest of the scene is leathery, people (faces/hands/bare skin) can be photoreal or plastic. I guess that’s a factor of SDXL being trained on so many photoreal images.

* Even with “signature,logo” in the negative prompt (and no sigs/logos in the training images), the TI often adds a sig at bottom right. Grrr.

As well as embroidered/stitched leather, suede and other fabrics, the TI was trained with:

rivets, sequins, rhinestones, flatback gems, embroidery jewels

and various sorts of beads: glass, pearl, faceted, plated, seed, bugle, Delica.

If you prompt with just the TI trigger, you should get a random tree/woman/flower - some will be scenes, others will be more like patterns. For more directed prompting I found that this form usually works:

the TI trigger, scene description, secondary descriptions

Examples would be things like:

cs-l3ath3r, unicorn, galloping

cs-l3ath3r, sheep, grassy meadow, wildflowers

cs-l3ath3r, sailing dinghy on a lake, distant mountains, stormy sky

You can obtain interesting caricatures/portraits by using a famous person’s name, e.g.:

cs-l3ath3r, Albert Einstein face

Moving the TI token rightwards in the prompt (or reducing its weight) causes a shift from leathery scenes to scenes with some leather elements.

Testing and showcase images done in Forge version: f0.0.17v1.8.0rc-latest-276-g29be1da7.

The showcase images are from 10 simple prompts and 10 complex prompts.

Sampler: testing worked well with...

DPM++ 2M Karras 25<--->50 steps, generally I used 30 or 40 in testing

CFG scale: 5<--->10, generally I used 6 or 7 in testing

Mostly used Hires.fix at either 1.25 or 1.5 to increase the detail a bit.

Hires.fix steps 15<--->25, 4x_NMKD_Siax_200k or your favorite, denoising 0.4

I didn't use any other adjusters/controlnet/i2i/post-processing for the showcase images.

During testing I kept the negative prompt as simple as possible, e.g.:

closed eyes,signature,logo

Checkpoint models that worked well when I tested this TI:

Clarity XL

https://civarchive.com/models/471585/clarity-xl

Magie_Noire v4

https://civarchive.com/models/505656?modelVersionId=612138

Crystal Clear XL

https://civarchive.com/models/122822/crystal-clear-xl

ZavyChromaXL v8

https://civarchive.com/models/119229?modelVersionId=563988

Note that some checkpoints respond well to fabric crafting terms without additional TIs or LoRAs. A good example is @Marielle’s Magie_Noire series:

https://civarchive.com/models/505656

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