u/Sanity_N0t_Included

My idiot boomer mother will be quick to regurgitate some anti-socialism rant she heard on Fox News (which is her sole source of information) and yet....

1. Her social security is her ONLY source of income.
2. She lives in an apartment building that is HUD Section 202 / 8 subsidized.
3. The constant barrage of medical tests / procedures / surgeries she is having are covered by her Medicare.

Without those social programs she would be completely broke, on the street, and even less healthy BUT socialism will be the death of America. SMH...

Typically a service company has a certain level of QoS (Quality of Service) they provide to customers. These frontier model providers have NO Service Level Agreements and they move the goal posts on a weekly basis for the services that customers are paying for.

Remember back before everything was streaming and people paid a monthly fee to watch cable? What if at times suddenly a chunk of the channels you paid for were not available? Or you had to wait your turn to watch something? Or the thing you tried to watch was completely not what you had asked for?

What if at certain times the quality of your phone calls became horrible because "too many people using - lack of compute"? What if you made your business 'being on the phone' and you came to depend on the service?

I know those are not the best examples and that frontier models are relatively new and rapidly advancing, but, it is incredibly annoying when you are paying for something from day to day you have no idea what level of quality to expect. And yeah, how exactly could someone predict any kind of service level with generative AI?

ESO is bringing in roughly $15M per month so the job cuts are not about the 'survival' of the business. Like someone else said, it is about the soul-crushing kowtowing at the alter of the almighty shareholder. So the silver lining is that they are not completely killing the game or studios. And from the news coming out of ZOS it sounds like they will just be pumping the brakes so they can see what they now have to work with and they will adjust the release scopes and schedule. But that is better than the worst case scenarios. And lets hope and pray that once the dust has settled with whatever the hell Microslop is doing with XBox, that they will be able to go back to hiring people before long.

Anyone else wonder how many of the "Hire Me" posts are from legit people and how many of them are just some guy in an apartment with access to ChatGPT and Claude?

I mean..... it makes me wonder. So many of the posts I see are offering some type of technical services that could be done quickly and easily with a subsciption to ChatGPT and Claude.

I think I'm finally at a point where I am ready to share something I've been working on to get some feedback. So any feedback would be greatly appreciated. This is not a 'finished' product by any means. It is still very much a work in progress with a good To-Do list. But some feedback and/or ideas would help me out.

First let me give you the premise for this whole thing. Before February I had done nothing with diffusion models. I started to get into it, downloaded ComfyUI, Z-image-turbo, and got hooked. In march I used my bonus from work to purchase a new laptop with a 5090 24GB VRAM / 64 GB system memory so I could start also playing around with learning video models.

(Why I'm doing this:) - All for fun.
I thought it would be fun to create 3D animated versions of my fiancée and our families, and then use them as the characters in a fantasy adventure story that is based on a fantasy version of her home country. So I set out going through the process of developing a story, the characters, world building, etc. My goal was to make something that is entertaining and also family friendly. I think to back to when my own kids were young and how we would enjoy watching things together.

I try to make every scene have a purpose whether it is revealing something about the story, the world, or a character. But….. Do I have a kitchen scene that exists so my 5 year old nephew can say "Hey! That's me!"? Yes. Yes I do.

 

I have a character that is a daydreamer and longs for some adventure in life. So I thought it would be fun to have a scene with one of those typical Disney "I want" songs. (Imagine Belle at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast) so I worked that in to help show her some of her personality and motivation.

(Quality of the work:)
I am a noob to all of this but I'm having an absolute blast. I don't have money coming out of my ears so I try to use local models as much as I can unless the scene calls for more than I can produce locally. I am not blaming models for my lack of experience for bad edits or if a scene does not flow well.  

(Character Voices:)
I know that voice consistency could be achieved if I took the time to do the voice acting / convert voice using a model / etc. but I do this in my spare time and I just don't have that much time. I have found that I can get between 80%-90% voice consistency by giving LTX consistent voice anchors for each character. For example, for the wizard Hazel, every time she speaks I use "the teenage girl in the blue wizard robes, says in teen girl's voice with a mid-range pitch, clear smooth texture, measured and articulate delivery, and a calm, thoughtful tone: "Nice to meet you, my name is Hazel."" Each character gets an anchor of (gender & age / pitch / texture / delivery / and tone. And tone is one you play with. Depending upon the conversation I might change her from "thoughtful tone:" to "playful tone:". And before anyone tries to argue that this technique does not work, just watch the video for yourself. Like I said it's not 100%, but I'll take it. BTW I also find that using the same voice anchors if I need a shot from Seedance seems to keep it within that 80%-90% range too.

(My To-Do list:)

1. Still several shots to remove the extra 'music' from. Way too many shots left (Thank you LTX. LOL)
2. Re-work the knight sparring scene to something that flows better
3. 2 scenes to complete and inject before the shift of setting to Seabreeze to make the transition flow.
4. Re-balance the dialogue to background music in some spots.

 

Looking for LTX suggestions:

I would love some suggestions on how to get better results from LTX in certain situations. Places like the dialogue shots (ex: 15:09 in the video) are where LTX really shines. BUT places like the 15:00 mark where the two people are simply walking forward and her face is melting into goo is where LTX drives me nuts. Maybe it's something I'm not doing correctly. I've seen people post some amazing things they've made with LTX but any time I attempt any real motion things turn nasty quick.

 

Title says it all. I was waiting for the dust to settle on Ideogram 4 to see if anyone had come up with a way to put 3 or 4 original characters into a single image with the BBoxes yet? Or has that capability been ruled out?

https://preview.redd.it/hqpaabslfy7h1.png?width=236&format=png&auto=webp&s=4d09dedb9117d6df8f4d79b4a21c22882afd9e7d

Title pretty much says it. That is the one use case that would prove useful enough for me to give it a try. I am not a fan of FaceFuse or most other methods for trying to place 2 or 3 original characters into the same image.

So has anyone experimented with LoRAs yet?

I just saw this and I think it speaks to several points Sagaar has made before.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/EpG4LME2GP