#midjourney tutorial

Overpainting was the most effective way to get the designs to where I wanted them, and this is going to be the main breakdown of that (later posts about other knights will likely focus on other aspects).

I used Midjourney's edit feature to do this. The first step is getting the image high-enough res to work with. MJ's edit feature can be used as a very effective image upscaler, and that's the first step.

It's also useful for removing word balloons and other obstructions that the AI will later misinterpret and getting a view of an entire character if parts are cropped off. You will need to often extract backgrounds manually, especially with comic art where AI background removal tools usually fail.

Once the image is upscaled you're going to get better results using the overpainting/retexture feature. Which you're going to have to use a lot because anytime you're using overpainting to shift a character in art style, its going to involve compositing.

No single version of Vola or Sekra had all the right parts, so photoshopped the bits I liked together before re-loading it into MJ's editor for some touchups. Sometimes you have to make a mockup and use that as a character reference or fully retexture over it.

You'll notice that I removed Vola's net. Accessories, if on the character model, will always be on the character when used with Vidu's system, and often glitch because of it. You can always put them back in with a second image reference or with a specific reference that still has them.

Once you have the reference image, you can use the character. Though if you want to use them a lot, you'll want a full model sheet with multiple views.

I actually prompted this back in 2022, when Midjourney was under version 3. I've been reorganizing my images lately and also cataloging things like old prompts, and I came across the above image in its original grid:

Since I'm playing Fear & Hunger right now, this is all very on-brand.

I have recently found a trick in Midjourney for getting access to the old school aesthetics with more of the current control and coherence (and speed), for at least some of the old models, the region-vary works, so you can select a section of background, change the version on the prompt, and run it, and it will move the image to the new model more or less unchanged.

From there, you can use the iteration, outpainting, and upscaler functions as you desire, with different combinations allowing for varying levels of madness/coherence to your taste.

The initial image was a "creative" upscale, which reinterpreted the OG splorts through the new engine's tastes to create that interesting combination of texture and shadow. But it wound up reinterpreting the top of the column of heads into a massive one, rather than the taper you get with the subtle upscale:

Which has a very different feel.

The image(s) above in this post were made using a dumb as hell prompt and have not been modified/iterated extensively. As such, they do not meet the minimum expression threshold, and are in the public domain.

I was inspired to start experimenting along these lines by this: