Post #117 - The Wing's the Thing
Not My Little Pony?? What sorcery is this?
Something different, my friend. Today, I just wanted to put something special together as a tribute and thanks to @SXCD2719. They're the maker of the Cinema checkpoint merge, which has recently saw its second release: CinemaScope. If you keep up with my posts, then you might already be familiar: literally my last two posts (here, and here) were about it! I had the incredible opportunity to produce some of the generations on display for the model's v2.0 showcase.
This post, though, is a less about Cinema, and more about celebrating SXCD2719's accomplishments—not just Cinema and its releases, but all they've done with AI generation. I've put together this post of their OC, Little Wing, as a way of both congratulating them and thanking them.
I've had the lucky chance lately not only to work with them—on the showcase—but also just to chat with them casually in general. I have to say: when you go look at the Cinema checkpoint page, what you see is a general CivitAI model page giving you details on a great model, like so many others great models shared on this site. But it is a very transformative thing to listen to someone talk about why they are doing what they do, and what inspires them, and what it is that they see in what they're trying to make. Getting exposed to that depth, and then looking again at the Cinema checkpoint page illuminates the model in a whole new way. You wonder about the power of films and cinema, and why things that are larger than life mean so much to us, and how these stories painted on enormous canvases capture our imaginations. And, you learn something also about the people who pursue the creation of these fantastic things.
It's just very inspiring for me.
Fortunately, SXCD2719 loves to see generations of their character (hence why they put up the Little Wing LoRA!), so it has made this task of creating a ‘Thank-You post’ very, very, almost unfairly straightforward.
The post is actually divided into two halves. The first ten images are previous images: most were made before Cinema's v2.0 release, either for fun, or for tests. I had never put them on CivitAI because they didn't ‘fit’ my very MLP-themed CivitAI page, and I had just shared them directly with SXCD2719 elsewhere anyway. The second ten images are all brand-spanking-new, never-before-seen, Little Wing generations made expressly for SXCD2719, because sometimes a surprise ‘thank you’ is better than the vanilla variety.
So, my dear friend: sincerely, this is for you. It's been such an incredible pleasure to meet you and witness what it is that you do. Thank you.
I want to this post to focus on the appreciation, so I'm going to close out the blurb with that. I'd honestly love to get into more generation details on some of these images because some of them have quite a bit of work put into them, and I'm not sure CivitAI's little breakdown of generation details is so useful anymore. Many aren't just ‘txt2img low-res gen -> img2img hi-res’ anymore. There's GIMP editing, leading to img2img inpainting or re-painting, in multiple cycles, with different, adjusted prompts between cycles. The reality is that even if you took the same models used here, and set them up in ComfyUI like I did, and copied the seeds and prompts and everything, you wouldn't get the same results as me because I just took too many extra steps along the way.
A solid eighteen of the images are hi-res and will go into the Hi-Res Collection. The other two images—Little Wing soothing the savage beast, and Little Wing on a motorcycle in the heart of Synthwave City—are 1440p, and therefore worthy of the honorable title of Desktop Background, so they go into the Desktop Background Collection.
My friends: you have a lot to offer the world, and to others, and to yourself. I know how hard it is sometimes to be able to see it. But that's why two pairs of eyes are better than one.