This tutorial will take you through a prompt progression that will show you how a prompt is slowly developed to end in a final outcome that is very different from the start point. I am going to do this by showing screenshots from the history of Fooocus which you can open up from a tiny link which is located at the bottom of the Setting tab of the advanced menu.
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The history log is extremely useful to get to the previous prompts which you can just copy and paste. However, another usage is that it also gives you the "seed" of the iteration, and if you like a particular seed, all you need to do is copy it, uncheck "random" in the Setting tab and paste it in the box that opens.
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Note: Your entire history from the very first moment that you start working with Fooocus is preserved inside a folder called "Output" that you can find inside a folder called "Fooocus" that is at the top of the main Fooocus folder where run.bat is. However, in time this output will grow to an enormous size, so it is advised to clean it out from time time and put whatever you want to hold onto in an external drive.
We start out with a short prompt that is not too complicated and only demands from the generator the basics of we want to see. In this case what I want to see is a female hippopotamus in the 1950s rock n roll style, the female fashion name for this is "rockabilly". I also want to see her on a "grey gradient background", so I add that in as well. The preset that I have chosen is 'Adorable 3D Character' which tends to put rather silly grinning expressions on faces, so in order to avoid that I add the words "serious" "frowning" to make sure we do not have any stupid grins. Although I do put in "grey" and "brown" to denote the color of the hippo, I still get a piggy pink creature since the algo has misunderstood my request, assuming that I was talking about her outfit. So, the result is what you see below - very average and disappointing:
In the second round of iterations I add "shoes" since the first iteration only gave me bare feet. I add "skinned" right next to grey and brown, in order to get a better hippo skin tone. But, I also want a fatter and bigger hippo, so I also add "big" and "fat". But also, and importantly, I start to add a negative prompt: I do not want "eyelashes" and I do not want an excessively "big head". So the prompt has gotten a bit longer and a bit more demanding of the algorithm, but not by much, as you can see below:
I decide to add some accessories - a "1950s hat" and "female 1950s sunglasses". I also add the word "obese" since, as far as I am concerned, the hippo still isn't fat enough. The result is disappointing since neither the hat nor the shoes look anything like what I had envisioned. The algo went and put a military hat on the poor thing! And some perfectly contemporary looking trainers on her feet! Nothing 1950s whatsoever...
I try to get the algo to make a 1950s hat for a very long time, probably 3 or 4 iterations with 4 alternatives each, however it is no use. All I get is military hats or no hats at all. I change the words that I use, but to no avail. I do not get the hat. So, I decide to delete the hat but add the word "bow" so that at least she gets something on her head. With the shoes I have more luck: There is a style of flat formal shoes for both men and women called the "saddle shoe" that was very popular in the 1950s. And when I add saddle shoe into the prompt, hey presto, I get what I want. I also start to add color requests for the outfit. In this iteration I ask for "black" white" "orange". And then I also add the "polkadots" which is the name of the small dots on fabric that was also very popular in the 1950s. The sunglass prompt has also been extended, it now says "1950s transparent pointy ladies sunglasses" since the previous iterations made these very dark and masculine things that made the poor hippo look like a mafia boss.
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The algo obviously often ignores request, which is the reason why we make so many iterations since we need to select the good ones and get rid of tons of unwanted stuff. Here what has happened is that although I have "grey brown skin" what I have gotten is a pink hippo that looks like a pig, so this would either have to get inpainted in a second round, or get deleted altogether.
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The negative prompt has gotten considerably longer also at this point, as you can see below. There are a lot of things that I want the algo to avoid putting in the picture, from hat styles, to accidentally making humans instead of hippos. Much of this comes out of previous iterations, where the algo has in fact made mistakes such as making humans instead of hippos and obviously I want to avoid these as much as possible. The negative prompt definitely decreases the chances of such mistakes, but does not eliminate them altogether, they will still happen occasionally, but there will hopefully be fewer of them.
As you will see below, I decided to get bolder with colors as I went along. So, I added "dark" "red" "blue" to the black and orange that I already had. The important word here is "dark" because without it I wouldn't have gotten the strong bold colors that we see here.
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However, a really important addition that I made is that I added motion to the figure. In all the previous iterations all that she was doing was standing with her hands on her waist or on her side which is boring to say the very least. So, I added "dance pose turned slightly left both arms lifted one leg bent and lifted" which is quite a mouthful for the algo to swallow, but it did give me some results, one of which is the one below. The prompt got longer in other ways also since I specified leg sizes and lengths by writing "very short very fat legs" and I also reemphasized the fatness of the body.
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Something else happened here that I should also point out: I was working on another project for which I had several styles, as you can see in the history log. When I switched back to the hippo I forgot to disable these and they stayed together with 'Adorable 3D Character'. Luckily they do not seem to have had much of an effect, which is quite surprising. But I wanted to show you this especially since this is a very easy mistake to make and although it was fine in this instance, it could have been otherwise. So, be careful with this.
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Finally, as you can see the head of the hippo is a very different color from the limbs. And since this is actually a nice pose and outfit otherwise, I would probably still want to use this, in which case I would need to fix this pretty serious error. I can do this with inpainting inside Fooocus, or actually probably easier by selecting the outline of the head with the magnetic lasso tool in photoshop and colorizing the head with HSL palette.
We are at the end of the progression, where I made some final and rather drastic changes: First off, I realized that the word "rockabilly" was giving some rather girly cute results which was not what I really wanted. What I really wanted was a so-called "bad girl" hippopotamus. So I added "bad female hippo" which also helped bringing about a facial expression that has far more personality. Then, I deleted rockabilly and replaced it with a very long definition of what I actually wanted to see which reads as "many button badges many lapel pins jewelry watch dark red blue orange black sexy 1950s rock n roll female outfit made of vest belt t-shirt tutu skirt wrinkled thick bobby socks some denim some patterns".
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And then I also changed the pose. The dance stuff wasn't really making the hippo "move", therefore it was replaced with "victory cheering pose turned slightly left jumping in the air both arms lifted" which did give me something that is closer to an animated pose. This can be improved upon by adding more definitions such as "energetic" or "kinetic".
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As you can see at this final stage both the prompts, positive and negative, have gotten to be very long. Once a prompt gets to be this long however, you need to start prioritizing as to what is more relevant. So, the order in which I placed the requests also changes. There are also many situations in which the algo refuses to make something although it is clearly in the prompt but further along. It helps when these ignored requests get prioritized and put at the start as well.
Since she has turned out to be such a good bad girl, in the end I also wanted to give her a companion. This was easy enough to do: I simply changed female to male and changed the garments list accordingly. The rest of the prompts are pretty much the same. But one other thing that I did was using the same seed which would be far more likely to give the same style than a random seed would. And here he is - a very bad hippo boy indeed!
