When I first started making model merges just about a year ago, I got into it because I was realizing that certain things worked on one type of checkpoint, but not on another. Certain Anime/Hentai concepts could not ever be performed on a Realistic Checkpoint. And conversely, certain elements of realism (like lighting calls, and such) don't ever work with art based models. Sure, there were lots of great general purpose models like Deliberate and some of those old stand-by checkpoints - but they didn't do the sexy stuff as well or they don't quite go real enough for my liking.
And so, my journey toward finding that perfect blend of concepts, styles, and easy-to-prompt generations began. What follows in the next section is the story of how we got from the early days to this monster upgrade that is: XenoGASM-MK2: The 2nd Coming.
In the Beginning
I began with XenoEngine ArtStyle Mega Model - which had two purposes - one, cram as many concepts into a checkpoint as I could possibly fit and two, make it push for a more "Western Comic/Cartoon" style than the Anime/Hentai styles many of these (fetishy/sexy) concepts pushed toward. The early versions (1.x and 2.x) were pretty bad. Lots of slop and garbage - so bad that I removed them (and don't even have copies anymore. lol) But by version 3.0 I was starting to get the hang of things.
At that point, I started working on various experiments - such as XenoEngine 5th Dimension and 6th Sense, which took the ArtStyle concept but didn't care as much about drifting toward anime or hentai - just experiments in stacking styles and concepts. 5th Dimension brought in lots of abstract concepts - like mentioning various "drugs" or typically invisible concepts like feelings or "music playing" which would then have a visual response in the generations. 6th Sense brought in many fantasy and "hybrid/fantasy creature" type stuff. They aren't proper flagship models like ArtStyle - but they are a lot of fun to play with and have aged fairly well, considering all the garbage in there (which we'll get to in a bit).
Next, I started playing with photo realism. I knew I was never going to get to perfection with the whole "real" bit since I was going to be introducing so many concepts only understood as "art" stuff - it was naturally going to push away from that "real" business and want to go toward art. From here I started mixing in things from my other checkpoints which had minimal effect on the realism, but maximum effect on learning other styles and concepts. And this gave birth to XenoREALITY.
The Birth of XenoGASM - Generation 8
From there, it became obvious... we needed something "realistic" that would also do even more stuff traditionally only for Anime/Hentai/Toon models - but still stay fairly real. If XenoREALITY was my 7th Generation (after 6th Sense) of models, XenoGASM marked the start of the 8th Generation. Versions one and 2 (and 2.1 - v2 was actually a mistaken release that eventually turned into XenoPHOBIA) were the concepts - and everything that came after that was intended to improve the "realism" factor without losing much of the concept training.
Ultimately, this was a sort of mixed success. As the new versions were made, my quest for "more real!" always won out over "make sure we don't lose that concept". So it got more real, but the later versions just don't have that ability to hit on as many different things.
As time went on, new trained models started coming out - and generally, the entire community was getting better at training and merging - so things just worked better. The new models had lots of skill and talent, but they lacked a lot of the "fun" my older models had. So it became a mission to sneak some of the old school "fun and whimsy" into the newer stuff out there. This led to various experiments like Kitsch-In-Sync, XenoXTC (in various style flavors), and various other models which led to the end of the 8th Generation of models with things like XenoPLASTY and the more refined XenoMORPH.
The Road to Gen 9
During all this, I was learning LoRa training, new merging methods, and all kinds of great stuff while the newly trained checkpoints (especially in terms of realism) were getting better and better. I learned about negative merging to help checkpoints forget or unlearn bad habits, for one thing.
As an example of "negative merging" - there was a while where a whole bunch of new models came out and many of them had a certain "eye detailer" Lora which generally worked great for close shots up to about chest/bust distance - but anything beyond that would leave some white ring artifacts in the eyes. In early days - that was the best we had, but the new checkpoints don't have that problem. So... once I identified the eye model, I merged it into my base module at a negative weight and using a "training difference" type merge. In the end (if I got the weights right) this ultimately negated or zeroed the effects of that LoRa that were so heavily ingrained in the older generation models - thus letting me use them without bringing in the artifacts from that now defunct eye helper.
And so it was for 4 months, or thereabouts, I set out cleaning old stuff and removing bad habits and generally yucky elements that had been merged in over time by all of us model mergers, and leaving just the good stuff - while also adding in some of the newer things. With each major improvement in a specific niche/style/concept module - my existing checkpoints would get updated or a few new ones created (one-offs like XenoBABES or specialized limited function models like Heroine Chic or more realistic mega models like XenoVERSE).
Generation 8 officially ends, I suppose, with XenTAI - the Hentai Model that pushes toward a western art/cartoon/comic book style.
MK2 - XenoEngine 9th Generation
Although XenoGASM MK2 is the only one bearing that name, so far, the basic guts for all the things that go into MK2 core modules started out with XenoGRAPH. This model does "realism" really well, but lacks some of the whimsy and fun. I think my favorite part of it is that it defaults to a sort of "person you might meet on the street" sort of look for people rather than the polished supermodel looks that most of the other realistic models provide.
From there, I went back to the original 3.x versions of XenoEngine ArtStyle and started cleaning out the chuff and seeing what newer concepts, styles, and functionality I could get into it. Then finishing off with my new merging techniques, XenoGRAPH (minus some of the realism modules that went into it) and my other merge modules I'd been working on created the V5 of ArtStyle.
Next, I wanted to see if we could get ridiculous proportions onto people who still bore some semi-real looks about them... And so, new modules and some stuff from ArtStyle and XenoGRAPH, took the OG release of XenoMORPH and pushed it more toward realism (without a huge price on body controls).
Following the original progression, one of the older/cleaner XenoREALITY releases and these new techniques brings us a Gen9 release of REALITY which, as the original base of XenoGASM was a critical ingredient in the road to an update for that.
My next, and final problem on the road to updating the original XenoGASM to a new and better version was the fact that my push for realism had pushed out a lot of the fun, plus - in spite of it still being, overall, a great model - anything I tried to add to it was breaking things. It was just too far in a bad direction. No update path possible.
Or so I thought....
The Birth of XenoGASM-MK2
After version 2.1 I (mostly) stopped adding new concepts and sacrificed a lot of the old ones in favor of "more realism." And that worked, but the sacrifices where in the wrong place for a path forward. And so I set about going back through the old 1.0 and 2.1 versions of it and cleaning out the garbage, mixing them and getting a good, solid, semi-real model like those were - minus most of the bad habits. With that cleanup done and the results in hand, the merge of XenoREALITY and my new CleanerGASM was made and...
I was bored.
I mean, it worked great. Looked great. It did most of the things I wanted and prompted really well before things started happening to whack out fingers and other unavoidable issues. But it was boring - it just didn't have that "whimsy" and "fun" stuff that I really want in the models - especially ones that I consider "flagships" for my brand, as it were.
Then I remembered how my new traindiff and inversion techniques had allowed me to merge ArtStyle into the new REALITY version without hurting the realism TOO much - a little nudge back with XenoGRAPH and it was great. So... what if I merged ArtStyle in here at the end, too? Even though I was about ready to say, "Ahh, it's a little boring, but a great model, let's release it," I couldn't control my urges so I tried it. And... BAM. It was freaking awesome.
What's Fun/Unique Interesting About XenoGASM-MK2: The 2nd Coming?
The biggest fun and new thing here (with most of my Gen9 models, in fact) is that unlike general purpose models that easily switch between styles - my new inversion merging techniques also make things work a bit differently when changing styles. Asking for "comic book art by Jim Lee" won't try to replicate that style and draw it - instead it takes various elements, shapes, coloring, and other things FROM that style and then merges them into the base style.
So, no matter what you do, it will generally always hang onto a lot of that "semi-realism" sensibility and rather than moving to a new style, it brings elements FROM that new style you ask for INTO the semi-real style of the model.
As an example, here are two tech demo generations. I asked for a superhero (from a wildcard - and apparently it doesn't know "medusa" - the one in the second image) in a "Vincent Van Gogh inspired Starry Night and Sunflower Fields background". And, as you can see, our main character still has that "semi-real" look so it didn't make the image "be" in the style - it pulled in various elements from Van Gogh's style and incorporated them into the image.
This also results in a lot less style pollution (especially once I negated most of the bad things that had been merged into some of these older merges that contained the fun styles/concepts). On many older style models, for example, as soon as you say "Gigantic Breasts" and then add any kind of weight to breast sizes that take them above a "normal realistic" size - the style also starts to push toward cartoon/anime/hentai. And this makes sense since inhumanly large breasts are only found in a few places and on few people, while they are quite common in Anime/Hentai things - and so the source material is heavily biased toward Hentai and Anime Styles. BUT... with this new merging method, the "semi realistic" hold is strong, but the shapes and sizes of those inhumanly large breasts come in long before they start turning things all cartoony on you.
NOTE: A lot of these techniques and concepts were employed when I made my XenoSLIDE Boobs and Bimbos Slider Set. The Breasts Only version - and to some extent, the Body Only version are among the best breast Loras out there. (Not to brag, but... they are).
A lot of concepts that typically don't work well together. For example, though it can still be a little tricky, it's possible to get speech bubbles, floating hearts and exclamation points and various other things normally only found in toon/anime models like knowing the difference between a "sime girl" (image 1) and a "slimy girl" (image 2). (Note - these are proof images, not final products, they could obviously use some post work like some hand fixes and upscaling and so on).
In all - it's just a great checkpoint to play with. Give it a try!
Learn More/Do More
Please don't forget to Follow Me here on Civitai so you will be informed of new things. (Plus, as of this writing, I'm just under 250 followers short of being eligible for the next round of Buzz Cash applicants - so every follow counts!)
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.
Have fun and enjoy the new model (and any of the other Gen9 toys you may not have played with... you can find the links in the copy above).