This probably was the most crazy week for me on civitai until now. I'll elaborate a bit below, but first about what was supposed to be the main topic of this article. I just published my 150th LoRA yesterday. Can you guess what it is from the cover image? (Spoiler: It is this one)
Someone told me yesterday it's International Rabbit Day, pure coincidence I swear! It did not take me three weeks this time like for LoRA number 100, though I meant to train it for some weeks now, but I got distracted every time I wanted to start doing it.
Fortunately I already had part of the dataset together since I initially planned to publish it for easter, but underestimated the number of outfits and did not finish it back then. It took me three days to finish it now.
The LoRA is working fine for most outfits, but there may be some concept bleeding, since some outfits are very similar.
After using the same illustrious checkpoint for a year now, I tried Plant Milk Walnut for the first time for the showcase images, since it has been recommended to me. I knew the other checkpoint I was using had some issues, especially with text representation, but it also messed up the outfits more than Walnut, so this is an improvement.
If you haven't checked out my LoRA, please have a look. Anima version is coming soon probably...
So about the other things that happened this week or last week. I published an article last week about Krea 2 prompting in non-english language. I didn't noticed it then, but it was the 50th article I published on civitai, so another milestone to celebrate. A lot of them are just bug reports so not that impressing to have, but some may still be useful, e.g. the guides I wrote.
Then a week ago I published my first LoRA for MiniMax H3. It's for creating a Sumi-e inspired ink wash painting style, I called it SumiInk. Only trained it on images, but seems to have turned out good. Since I submitted it to the H3 training contest, I would be happy about anyone who gives it a try. Also here are some other cool style LoRAs for H3 I already tried or want to try, check them out:
Rough Sketch Nature
Golden Sun?
Safari Eyes
Dark Style
Kim Possible Series
Also while I am writing this H3 character LoRAs for Gumdong and Ellie The Foxy Paladin have dropped.
Since there is an H3 gallery on the homepage now and I jumped at the right time my showcase videos got into rotation and got a lot of reactions. Most of them were made with help by @Foxntail, so please check out their work. Also I crossed the 2k follower mark last Sunday or early Monday I think. The most amazing thing this week happened Monday night though.
The cover video of my H3 LoRA got featured. This is the first time that some content of mine got featured, so it's a big thing. I am not entirely sure if this was featured automated from the H3 gallery or if it was hand-picked by JustMaier himself. It's somewhat ironic that it's a video though, since I had only published like 3 videos before doing the LoRA and I am close to 10k published images now...
Seeing the last 3 months that people got featured that never have been featured before I kinda had hopes this might eventually happen, but seeing these other people I know get their 3rd, 4th or 5th feature in 2-3 months was somewhat discouraging.
Anyway I am glad I can look at the homepage again without getting jealous.
But this wasn't enough, just a few hours later I got another feature, this time an image of mine. Thank you for that.
Really a crazy day for me^^
Because of having a video and an image featured at the same time I naturally got a lot of reactions and like 250 new followers in a week. So huge thanks to everyone who liked, followed and tipped me!
Another crazy thing due to the featured video and multiple videos in H3 gallery, at the time I am writing this I am at #3 of video master generators leaderboard.
While this is nice to have, it's kinda unfair for other video creators, who really know what they are doing and now get swept away by people publishing an H3 LoRA and having their stats boosted this way.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is (again) that it's not just about the quality of content you produce, it's very much about how much visibility you get.
And for the average user the visibility is pretty low, the recent site changes haven't changed that.
Now that I can look at it from the other side and have some stats from the creator studio, I'll probably write a separate article about this. Right now the only thing you can do to get some more visibility (without publishing an H3 LoRA) is pushing your content (or the content of others) to one of the curated collections that accept suggestions or submissions, i.e. Community Gallery, Share Some Love, Indie Spotlight, Stuff Dem liked, The Comedy Club. Thanks for doing these.
I want to thank all the people I have met here. For your support, for liking my stuff, for comments on my articles and models, for talking about LoRA training, for sharing info about prompting, for writing reviews, for sharing information about site issues, for pity, for joking around, for being a friend. I think I wouldn't have made it till here this year without you. I don't want to drop names, but I think you know I am talking about you.
So what's next for me? Now that I have finished LoRA 150 I can make some other stuff again. Especially some LoRA requests have been piling up and some people are waiting for half a year now that I do them, so sorry for that. I'll try to do some of them in the coming weeks. I have some other LoRAs trained I need to publish, e.g. Anima and Krea 2 version of my SumiInk style. I also want to train some more H3 LoRAs. Probably not gonna touch it anymore after the contest ends, but since generation prices are 50% right now, I think I can train and test some more.
Also talking with someone about it and showing them first results, I want to get back to trying to make my own custom checkpoint. That talk was encouraging, so thanks for that, and also it seems with the new model loading it may get easier to have it in the civit generator in long term.
Thanks for reading this far and bearing with my this time very subjective news.