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Tags I've found useful for making backgrounds in Pony and Illustrious (PDXL and ILXL)

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Tags I've found useful for making backgrounds in Pony and Illustrious (PDXL and ILXL)

I've found Pony is way more picky at backgrounds than SD1.5 was (you could throw really random locations at it and they'd blend together into something interesting), and even some stuff it recognizes doesn’t always get generated well. Here I’m listing tags I’ve discovered make good (or at least not blatantly non-Euclidean) backgrounds on their own (without additional LoRA). This is mainly to keep track of it for my own purposes (read: I edit this without change-log when I find something neat. I try to keep new stuff at bottom), but sharing this means other people can share their discoveries in the comments. (Backgrounds are an option for one of those big prompt comparison chart articles for anyone with the will and resources to try .) Some or all of this may work with Illustrious (ILXL), but I haven't tested any of it.

Update Jan 7: I have played around with Illustrious enough that I'm confident saying the majority of these should work there as well. Edit Mar 24: Since that update I've primarily focused on Illustrious and most of the newer stuff has only been tested in Illustrious (which is way better at BGs making sense).

Tags after a comma mean they’re supporting tags that make it more fleshed out and I haven’t really tried using them without the first listed. A ? means I've had a good result with it but haven’t experimented with it (or the string in parenthesis) enough to say for sure it’s useful or if it’s just other prompts/the LoRAs that in the mix doing the lifting/getting lucky.

Outdoors:

  • (badlands, crater, cliff, mountain?)

  • beach, sand, ocean,

  • canyon

  • castle background

  • city, cityscape, street, on roof,

  • desert, sand (, mojave desert?)

  • fantasy village background

  • farm

  • field

  • forest, trees

  • laboratory?

  • mountain

  • onsen, steam, wet, water

  • park

  • (ruined city, toppled skyscraper, rubble?)

  • slums, building, outdoors, garbage, rubble, ruins

  • wasteland, grey ground, rock, bare tree

  • plains, grass

  • alleyway, brick wall, trash can, dumpster, graffiti,

  • garden, flowers (potted plant as negative if you want everything neatly in planters)

  • mountain pass, (ridge?) Generates pic in mountains, though not as high up as desired.

  • coast (combines well)

  • ancient ruins, white marble pillar

  • airplane interior (window, sitting)

  • fitting room (much more stable on Illustrious than Pony. May want curtain, door, doorknob on negatives)

  • mall (this is more of a Japanese style multi-level indoor shopping complex than the open plaza American mall. May be SD's tendency to make backgrounds hallway like unless told otherwise)

  • gazebo (dreaded monster)

  • riverbed (neg: River)

  • marble pillar

  • market stall (use with festival, and optionally fireworks to make a Japanese festival. Negative Japanese architecture for anything else and don’t expect great results)

Indoors:

  • bunker interior, underground bunker,

  • castle background, throne,

  • catwalk (\modeling\), stage lighting, crowd

  • classroom, desk, blackboard

  • colosseum background (this one, oddly, only seems to work better with Pony than Illustrious)

  • fantasy village background

  • (fantasy ruins background, maze, labyrinth?)

  • hallway

  • living room, couch

  • shower (\location\)

  • spacecraft interior*, (spacecraft bridge?)

  • arcade, arcade machines,

  • store (adding adjective for store type?)

  • casino

  • club (needs "strip club, pole" in negatives)

  • bar, bar (place), saloon background, (the first two combine to make the bar's bar appear)

  • shouji, fusuma, tatami (Do not use "Japanese architecture". May need negatives like doorknob, outdoors, open door, window)

  • middle eastern architecture, palace, cushion,

  • locker room, locker, tile floor, bench,

  • garage (you will need to tag motor vehicle as negative if you don't want a car)

  • underground, cave (negative sun, sky, window, outdoors to avoid sunlight shining in)

  • warehouse, crates (this one is a bit checkpoint dependent)

  • tavern

  • ice rink, stadium, audience (negative: pool)

  • conservatory (surprisingly since this doesn’t have a lot of booru uses)

  • gymnasium (a bit shaky, but works)

Supporting objects:

  • building

  • carpet

  • ceiling light (great if you want ceiling to appear due to depth or angle)

  • grass

  • overgrowth, vines,

  • scenery, landscape

  • sidewalk

  • tree

  • trees

  • waterfall

  • path

  • wall/floor (ceiling works, though I've found ceiling light to make more natural in settings where it fits)

  • river

  • mountain (This makes a mountain in the background, rather than set your image on a mountain)

  • wheat (the first crop I've found that's consistently generated and generates as a crop instead of prepared dish)

  • treasure hoard, coins

  • lava

  • crowd (use with “solo focus” recomended. ILXL handles this better than PDXL. Try playing with weight to get the scene more or less densely packed. "females only" may reduce presence of males in crowd)

  • shipping container

  • trash

  • graffiti

  • sky, cloud (often come by default, but can help angle outdoor shots away from the ground. You can color these, e.g., "black clouds", "red sky")

  • rice paddy (only this specific name works well)

Unique Locations:

Specific places/landmarks. Don't expect the area around these to be accurate!

  • Effel tower

  • Arc de Triomphe (appears to only understand views from ground level)

  • Statue of Liberty

  • Tokyo Tower (the presence of "Tokyo" in the word means it at least knows this goes in a city)

Genres:

These have an influence on background. Beware their influence on other parts of image.

  • science fiction

  • cowboy western ("fringe trim" is a helpful negative to know)

  • fantasy

Enhancers:

  • cramped

  • night,

  • underground

  • dark

  • (black background:0.5) (Makes things darker. At full strength this tends to put a lot of "blank" space in the background. I've got some notes on a full article for this and other [color] backgrounds] but haven't had time to experiment when the generator wasn't messing with colors)

  • "Japanese architecture" as negative (useful for more western/generic buildings)

Negatives:

  • sun, sky, window, outdoors (helps makes indoor settings truly indoors)

Interactions:

  • sitting

  • laying

  • leaning

  • against wall, (leaning)

  • the conjunction "on" seems to produce good results when paired with background objects and nouns. "sitting on chair", "laying on bed", "leaning on rail" etc.

Known to models but poor results:

  • “Athletics Field” and/or “Track and Field” ("running track" is a bit more stable, but exceptionally limited in angle support)

  • Basketball Court

  • Bedroom (This is one of the worst offenders. Especially if doors or windows are present. Some checkpoints tolerate it better than others and Illustrious is better than Pony, but it’s rarely great. I've found it is pretty good at checking for overbaking in epoch pics though.) Update: Adding "wall" helps stabilize this one for some reason. Still not ideal, but vastly more usable.

  • Japanese architecture (this one needs heavy supporting word use to make clear which era/kind of Japanese architecture you mean, and I've concluded that you're better off just calling the elements you want)

  • Bus stop

  • Apartment (so many different areas are under this tag

  • soccer field

  • canal (functions, but poor compatibly with people)

  • Washington Monument (knows relative outline, but nothing else)

  • Mount Rushmore (knows there’s supposed to be heads on a mountain, and nothing else)

  • Independence Hall

  • Parthenon (decent at making Romanesque architecture, bad at making the Parthenon)

  • planetarium (interesting, but not a planetarium)

  • courtroom

*This one will alter the overall theme of the background a good deal.

(The cover image is "score_8, score_8_up, score_7_up, source_anime, anime screenshot, no humans, scenery, landscape, canyon, waterfall, outdoors" in WAI-ANI-NSFW-PONYXL

Update Dec 19: Realized I hadn't updated this in a while, so added a bunch of new tags I have found.

Update Feb 2 2025: Added some more stuff, including new sections on enhancers and interactions.

Update Mar 24 2025: Added a bunch of new stuff I've been collecting, including a new section on unique areas

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