RA-Mix: Ri-Mix Style Merge

RA-mix was created for Phinjo’s 26k follower celebration bounty. I was honored to take second place in the event, and with permission, I’m now sharing the merge with the community. @phinjo

Models used:

A-mix:
Pi v2:
id="what-is-this-merge">What is this merge?

Ri-Mix Pi v2 has great painterly detail, strong backgrounds, good lighting, and more interesting composition. It also has a dynamic western influence that gives images a different feel from a standard clean anime checkpoint. The tradeoff is that the facial area can sometimes come out softer compared to the rest of the image.

With RA-mix, I tried to influence Ri-Mix Pi v2 with the cleaner anime style of A-mix while keeping the parts that made Ri-Mix interesting in the first place. The goal was not to erase Ri-Mix or turn it into a standard anime model, but to clean up the facial structure while keeping the painterly detail, background strength, lighting, and more dynamic composition.

RA-mix is basically my attempt to balance those two sides: the cleaner face and anime polish from A-mix, with the western-influenced composition, lighting, and painterly detail from Ri-Mix Pi v2.

There was a little bit of tuning for the final version I'm posting but I think it turned out nice. I'm very happy with it's img2img abilites, and it's color range is very nice when using it with this application.

I wrote a step by step compariosn of the checkpoint here:

I also made an article that breaksdown the process I used to make the bounty image for Phinjo's compatition here: Recommended Settings:

A well-rounded setup for general SDXL prompting.

Steps: 30

Sampler: euler_ancestral

Scheduler: karras

CFG (Guidance): 5