u/ArchAngelAries

I’ve been trying to get a decent character LoRA trained for Krea2 using Ostris’s AI Toolkit, but I’m hitting a wall. I've burned through about $20 in Runpod credits so far trying different variations, and I’m hoping someone here might be able to steer me in the right direction so I stop throwing money away. I'm used to training Illustrious/Pony/Flux so I'm kinda new to Krea2 training.

My situation is that I’m on an AMD system on Windows. Getting Linux dual-boot to play nice with AI training has been a headache I finally gave up on, so I’m stuck using cloud compute. I don't want to keep sinking funds into Runpod only to end up with a LoRA that barely captures 30% of my character’s likeness.

Here is what I have tried so far:

• I'm training on Krea2 Raw
• I started with the default training parameters from AItrepreneur’s Krea2 LoRA Training YouTube tutorial, but the results were underwhelming.
• For my larger datasets (typically 75 - 100+ images) (my smaller datasets between 25 - 50 images) (AItrepreneur claims only about 15 - 25 images with a default max of 2k steps are all that's needed but I'm not seeing it in the results), anyway, for larger datasets I tried lowering the learning rate by half and bumping the steps up to 3k and also 4k on a separate run. I tried this because on one default run with the larger datasets the generations came out looking kinda fake & cooked, but when I reduced the dataset size and set back to default parameters I was stuck with the same issue of it not reproducing my characters' actual likeness.
• I'm using clean, natural language descriptive captions with a unique character trigger word.

The models seem to be barely learning my characters. I’m getting a generic interpretation rather than my actual OC. The concepts I’ve tried to train are also not really sticking.

I’ve been hesitant to just start cranking up the repeats because I’m worried about cooking the model or ending up with a totally rigid, unusable file.

Has anyone here successfully trained character or concept LoRAs for Krea2 that actually hold their likeness? Are there specific settings in the AI Toolkit you found that made the difference between "vague approximation" and a usable model? I’d really appreciate any insights on whether I should be looking more at my step counts, rank/alpha settings, or if there is something else in the configuration that I’m overlooking.

Thanks for any help you can share.