This checkpoint is made to retain most of the knowledge of base Illustrious/Noob while making everything as realistic as possible.

--Prompts have been attached to all of my gens--

I had one vision when I started working with Illustrious - creating a realistic merge that did not ruin the base model's extensive danbooru knowledge.

Prompts for the showcase images have been taken from all the best Illustrious model showcases and galleries. All showcase images for this model are one shots with random seeds and one hires fix. No Adetailers or inpainting has been used for those. In most cases, v2 feels way more real as the faces are much less anime-ish now. If you want the skin to be like v1, just use the suggested LoRA at 0.4 strength.

V1 has some problems with residual noise and general clarity. V2 should have more depth to its "realism", and should offer better compositions and quality in general as compared to the first version. Do try it out. (The first version can still be quite unique for "grainy" gens).

USAGE GUIDE: Now, here's some tips for squeezing the most amount of realism from this checkpoint (these are just my observations, feel free to experiment):

Make sure that you use lower values for your CFG (3-5). CFG 3 and karras works incredibly well for realism.

Use DPM++ 2M with the "Beta" or "Karras" scheduler, and do a highres pass at 1.5x at 0.33 denoise and half the original steps. (Please experiment with different sampler and scheduler combinations if you can).

Remove all instances of artist names and other "painted" styles from your prompts (unless they tend towards realism).

For the positive prompts, include this in the first part (Kinda IMPORTANT):

Optional - "cinematic lighting"

real, 4K, RAW, photoreal, DSLR photo, real skin, For the negative prompts, maybe use this?

cropped, lowres, worst quality, sketch, unfinished, greyscale, faded, low saturation, jpeg artifacts, watermark, text, anime, CGI, 2D