This is a merged Illustrious checkpoint made with intention of creating realistic character generations without losing most of the innate Illustrious knowledge.
V2 should be a decent improvement overall, with much better faces, lighting and knowledge, but colder colors.
All the example images are made with the usage of Hiresfix and ADetailer using only this checkpoint. Feel free to ask any questions about the exact usage.
Civitai page: https://civitai.com/models/1327813/spectralmix
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Model pros:
Good character and concept knowledge, you can generate almost any character that base illustrious can if you specify a couple of design details.
Faces and skin look reasonably realistic for said character knowledge degree.
Really good lighting, you can generate actual night scenes or harsh shadows, without it looking like the whole image is lit by a spotlight.
Cons:
Same-ish faces, they will still change with the usage of quality tags, specifying a different ethnicity or with different characters.
Some character will have very 2.5D faces, so you would probably need to lower character prompt strength with a combination of suggested tags to get decent realistic results. The problem is mostly with eyes, so I would appreciate if anybody will find better quality tags to fix this.
Some expressions are a bit cartoonish. Using 50+ steps for them is a good idea. Looks a bit more natural.
Models used in merge:
Quintillus - "Reality https://civitai.com/models/1131256
Uncanny valley https://civitai.com/models/507472
LeafVice [ illustrious ] by Leaf https://civitai.com/models/1177564
RealVisXL V5.0 https://civitai.com/models/139562/realvisxl-v50