Prompt: Sunny Starscout with cybernetic legs in a cyberpunk pony setting with Sweetie Bot

Deadline: 2023.05.15

Reward: The winner will have her art immortalized as cover art on a story for everypony to see with a reference link back to the artist, of course. Said story with your cover art will also automatically participate in a writing competition.

Rules:
-One picture per comment. That's the challenge, you see? Getting two characters into one picture is not trivial. Sure, you can just stick two pictures together, but you're less likely to win that way.
-You can post as many entries as you want, but only one per reply.
-The cybernetic legs are an essential part of the story, so they're unavoidable. But you can get around this by not featuring them in the picture (closeup, obstacles,...).
-If you're a noob, you can try your luck by featuring just one of the two characters or sticking two pictures together but know that your chances of winning might be impeded.
-You're free to edit the resulting picture in any way, as long as you use AI art at least as a part of your creation process.

Judging: The comment below with the most points on the deadline date (2023.05.15) will win. Points = upvotes - downvotes

7829367
This contest sounds mostly like you're requesting cover art, in a fairly small group, too.

Well, best of luck to anyone participating! You can find LyCORIS for g5 characters, including Sunny, over here.

You can also head over to AstraliteHeart's page to pick up pony v1-v4 and ponysoup for models, and a few extra over here.

--Sweetie Belle

7829404 It does sound like that, doesn't it? However, the reward is real.

Thanks for sharing the resources.

7829409
No problem. Without those LyCORIS, people probably aren't gonna manage to produce Sunny Starscout.

Even at that, I feel like the approach is probably going to be to generate a cyberpunk cityscape, which is easy enough, generate a separate picture of Sweetie Bot, probably by generating Sweetie Belle as a cyborg or robot, maybe with some inpainting, generating a third picture of Sunny Starscout, inpainting her legs to make them robotic, then try to combine the three pictures.

--Sweetie Belle

7829367

(This involved a bunch of inpainting, and even exporting to Clip Studio Paint several times, airbrushing over areas, then inpainting the areas I airbrushed so the ai'd go in the direction I wanted. And I did basically generate one picture of Sweetie Bot in a cybertech city, and a second picture of Sunny, remove the background, and paste her in, then img2img away the seams.)

--Sweetie Belle

7829540 I think you just wiped the floor with all competition. I doubt anypony can outdo what you just did.

I don't know of anypony who has mastered AI art as much as you have.

I doubt there's anypony in this group who even can put two characters in the same settings (yes, this is a challenge to you all), much less make it so professional. The closest I personally came to that was this atrocity.

7829542
Most likely. I know a fair number of tricks.

A big trick, really, is that if you sloppily edit a picture and feed it back to the ai, you can get it to fix your edit up for you. I was able to get a good picture of Sunny with a background that I could remove with a magic wand and a bit of erasing, and found a good spot in a cyber world sweetie picture I generated, and pasted it in there, and then I just inpainted over the whole of Sunny at a low level, so it'd stick with it being Sunny, but would look more consistent.

I did things like when it was messing up the mane, just airbrushing over the bad spots with roughly the right colors, then inpainting so it'd actually draw a real mane there...

Another fun technique is that when you do controlnet and it generates a depth map, you can save the map and edit it, then tell it to use that. You can get the ai to add real, readable text that way!

Inpainting really is a big thing to know how to do, though. There are other ways to try getting two characters in a picture. My Tiled Diffusion extension has something called Regional Prompt Control. Didn't work that well in this case, though, so I didn't use it. That Sunny lycoris is very finicky.

Oh, I will note that I blatantly pasted in cutie marks. You will not get the right cutie marks in ai pictures 99% of the time...

--Sweetie Belle

7829542
This post is not an entry.

These were the two pictures I originally generated, and put together before doing a bunch of work on it, just to give you an idea.

--Sweetie Belle

Prologue:
This AI artist competition was open to the entire Universe. Anycreature could participate. Yet there could be only one winner among millions of capable artists; the very best of them all.

Results:
Congratulations, 7829540. All the other AI artists had literally nothing on you. You won the AI artist competition, proving to the Universe that you're the best AI artist of them all.

Your elusive masterpiece:

will become the cover art of the: Cyberpunk Sunny Starscout Buys Sweetie Bot story
with you as its cover art's source.

But that's not all!

The story with your cover art will automatically apply to the writing competition, giving you even more recognition as the best AI artist in the world!

Again, thank you for the effort you put into this. It was and is very appreciated.

7836137
This proves... that we definitely need more ai artists around.

No problem, though. It was fun to make.

--Sweetie Belle