XenoMANIA

This is a mutt checkpoint with months of smoothing and balancing the various elements so they can actually work together. You’ll find that simple prompts turn into nicely complex, elaborate, and sometimes surprising (in a good way, usually) results – but you can also hammer it with long and complex prompts and it’ll do its best to comply.

It excels at lots of different things and also has some great things happening that you won’t find in most other checkpoints (primarily because the checkpoints these new tokens were trained on don’t always play nice together without some smoothing and heavy balancing.

General Usage Tips

• Use the XM-Jackknife Negative Embeddings: The “Balance” version takes some of the slightly over trained concepts and puts a light negative on them. This means that you’ll still see the concepts in your output, but it will automatically “tone them down” a bit to start out more in balance with the rest of the prompt. You will still need to play with the weights in many cases – but for general prompting, this sort of just balances things out to a more level playing field.

  The “Portraits” version also adds some things to help with skin details, keeping hands from going (quite so) wild, and various other things that help with people/humans in your generations. I kept this separate because it can sometimes end up making SD want to add people to the scene when you don’t want them, or it might sometimes hinder making aliens and hybrids. Remove this if either of those things are happening, but generally – it works pretty well and shouldn’t hurt much.

• Play with the CFG Scale: Personally, I’ve found that a CFG Scale of 4-6 is good, and I tend to like 5 or 5.5. If the prompt you’re using goes a bit wild and looks over burned because you’re playing with tokens that are somewhat overstrained – try turning it down a bit. If you start to see something happening, but it’s looking unfinished or it isn’t “quite” getting it, turn the CFG up a bit. Higher CFG (up to 7 or sometimes 8) will pull from the checkpoint training more directly rather than the Lower CFG Scales using the prompt interpreter to bring in nearby tokens to help it along with things it doesn’t know very well.

• I prefer Euler A for a sampler, but we tested a bunch (thanks to @Kandid for blasting through a whole slew of different options). Try things out – we didn’t find any that were outright “bad” – though we did prefer some over others. (But we didn’t try every setting combo – so you may find a sweet spot that we didn’t).

• If you want realism – avoid Booru tags as much as possible. This won’t quite go photo-real (though it’s pretty close in some cases), but Booru tags ALWAYS go to art not photos, and will push the style accordingly.

• If you are using ADetailer – I like to set it to save before the run… sometimes it ends up being better without it. This is especially true on things that are somewhere between “realism” art/photo and “toon” art photos. The eyes for each of these styles are quite different, and with ADetailer – if you are in that “in between” zone, it can accentuate the “two different eye type” things and get not-so-pretty. Tokens that push toward “realstic” or “toon_style” (those tokens themselves can sometimes be enough) can help with the “white ring” around the eyes that sometimes creeps in too. (I’m still working on blending these better for future updates, though).

• You can get some decent results with as few as 8-10 steps (plus upscaling and maybe a ADetailer pass). That said, if the image is complex and full of dynamic action – you will still likely want to keep your steps up close to what you normally.

• When testing out new tokens to see if they work – start simple and build up. I spent a lot of time teaching this checkpoint to be “sensible” in that it tries to make good choices most of the time – but certain combinations of tokens can still send you off in a weird direction that makes it hard to get what you want. When you start simple and build out the prompt to ask it to do things it’s not already doing – you’ll have an easier go of it. If you start with complicated prompts, it can be hard to tell if it doesn’t know the token you’re trying to test or if it’s not working because something else is conflicting with it.

• Experiment and Have Fun

Models in the Recipe

A lot of these are things you don’t see in other checkpoints because, without the smoothing and blending I did to them before the merge, they just do funky things with other models. As such, some of these tokens may be unfamiliar to you (or may be things you used to like to use on my older models, but that have faded out because, until now, I avoided adding them back into things).

Hypno / Mesmerizers: This is a great checkpoint by itself, but merging it by normal methods always ends up creating stuff like my XenoPHOBIA checkpoint (the last checkpoint I made that included some of this). With this, I lowered the tendency to move toward horror – but it can still be evoked by calling for specific types of horror – or just using the token. Lovecraft and Cthulhu related tokens are really fun – and can often get those “eyes everywhere!” thing that PHOBIA is known for. Most of the tokens listed in the description there will work here.

Species: This is a checkpoint I used to use all the time, but learned that its way of making hybrids and other creatures often broke the new checkpoint’s ability to do hybrids and creatures that would normally be no problem. So, I smoothed and balanced this one (and merged it in at a fairly low weight), too. Many of the tokens in the description work (especially if you add some weight to them) but others do not. (e.g. I’ve never managed to get Pilot from Farscape to work).

Bondage v1.1: This has been archived, but I had an old copy so I merged it in there. No real tricks here – some of the stuff works well, some doesn’t. Try the things in the description and various posted images and profit. (Clothing tends to work really well – the restraints, especially gags and things on the face, not as well).

Subreddit v7: The tokens here are not really things that add stuff to your image so much as add helper references and quality tags. If you’re doing a BDSM scene, for example, just doing “r/BDSM” isn’t going to suddenly turn it into a bondage pic – but it may help improve the quality of some BDSM gear or equipment you’re describing in your prompt.

Blowbang Ultimate: Sex checkpoints suck – every one of them. At least in terms of being able to call specific shots. One of the things I like about the Blowbang checkpoint is that, if you just go for general descriptions of sex, it does a pretty good job – especially for orgy/blowbang stuff. My XenoGASM already has a bunch of sex stuff in it – so combining those two, and it’s kinda fun. You’ll still need help from LoRas and controlnet for specific things – but you can start it in a specific direction and it will often do an okay job coming up with something halfway decent. Your mileage may vary. (Join the discord below for tips and discussions for these kinds of pix).

Nimrod: AlexDS9 always trains the coolest stuff, but it can be hard to merge. This got the smoothing/balancing treatment, plus it’s already a lot more stable than the Babes and other cool checkpoints he’s made previously. Most of the tags that work on that should work here – though you might sometimes need a heavier weight on the tokens. (NOTE: This also does most of the Game of Thrones characters excellently).

And a bunch of my older merges and mixes smoothed and balanced and tucked inside.

Note on Preview Images

While I did a TON of early testing with different resolutions, samplers, and so on, most of the preview images are lower resolution “proofs of concept” and NOT “finished works”. I’ve tried to create things with a variety of subjects, themes, and so on – and then just posting whatever comes out – by looking at the previews, you might get an idea of some of the things the model struggles with just as much as what it does well.

In a lot of the images, I’m using other negative embeddings to help lock in on where this model needs help. Feel free to use them, but I’d still recommend the XM-Jackknife embeddings since they’ve been tuned to the specific job at hand and tend to help the quality a bit better than the ones I was playing with at first.

I make the checkpoints and try to give you tips on fun places to explore – but it’s up to YOU to make the great art with it. I’m just the tech nerd.

Learn More/Do More

Please don’t forget to Follow Me here on Civitai so you will be informed of new things.

Need help prompting, finding tools and techniques to accomplish specific things, or generally want to learn more about SD, Generation, Making your own LoRas, Checkpoints, TI’s and more – join the Xeno Engine Discord – we’re a growing group of creators from all over the world with various, though often a bit deviant, interests. (NSFW).

Please take a moment to like, collect, and review any of my models that you enjoy. Each of those things helps the model be more visible to the community. The more visible, the more likes and reviews and downloads, which leads to more buzz and more rankings. Eventually, I hope that my earning pennies for each dollar put into buzz will get me to the point where I’m making an extra $10 a week to cover my Friday PBR Six-Pack. I know… high hopes, but… I can dream, right?

The Only Dumb Question is the Unasked Question. This is an important rule that I live by. You might feel shy about asking for help with something that is probably obvious to most people who have been doing this for a while, but here’s a secret… we ALL were at that “total newb” stage at one point – and heck, when it comes to prompting especially, I still consider myself a “somewhat skilled novice”. If you want some help on something – it’s only dumb if you don’t ask. If you do ask – on site, on discord or wherever – you’ll never be looked down upon by me (or any of the people on the discord, lest they be shut down like an illegal gambling operation.