Starting over my SD1.5 merge with Pony.

My aim here was to land somewhere between cute and sexy, chibi and hentai, in a modern/polished version of the hentai style of the 90s used in series like Lunatic Night, Rei Rei, and F3, that were drawn in an older, more rounded, what I think of as a "bubbly" style.

I don't think I've quite hit what I'm after yet with pony models, but I'm happy with it for now as I test and play with it more. My attempts to merge in more cute had an... overly youthful effect on the waistline. So I'm kinda stuck for now anyway.

Preview images were made as follows:
Euler a at 30 steps, CFG 6-9, VAE: sdxl_vae is baked in, or any VAE of your choice
hires fix: R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B, 15 steps, .30 denoise, 1.5x upscale

General pony settings advice that I don't see often enough: (I use Forge if A1111 settings are different, and I have no idea what the equivalent for ComfyUI or others might be.)
Set Emphasis mode to "no norm", and "sdxl_clip_l_skip" (I do this via the quicksettings list) has stopped me from getting burnt out or distorted images and improved prompt response for pretty much any model.

Forge users: If you're having issues with Civitai recognizing model use, there is a temporary fix on this redit post on how to fix forge's checkpoint hash calculation.