Flux is what we wanted SD3 to be (review of the dev model’s capabilities)

(Disclaimer: All images in this post were made locally using the dev model with the FP16 clip and the dev provided comfy node without any alterations. They were cherry-picked but I will note the incidence of good vs bad results. I also didn’t use an LLM to translate my prompts because my poor 3090 only has so much memory and I can’t run Flux at full precision and and LLM at the same time. However, I also think it doesn’t need that as much as SD3 does.)

Let’s not dwell on the shortcomings of SD3 too much but we need to do the obvious here:

an attractive woman in a summer dress in a park. She is leisurely lying on the grass

and

from above, a photo of an attractive woman in a summer dress in a park. She is leisurely lying on the grass

Out of the 8 images, only one was bad.

Let’s move on to prompt following. Flux is very solid here.

a female gymnast wearing blue clothes balancing on a large, red ball while juggling green, yellow and black rings,

Granted, that’s an odd interpretation of juggling but the elements are all there and correct with absolutely no bleed. All 4 images contained the elements but this one was the most aesthetically pleasing.

Can it do hands? Why yes, it can:

photo of a woman holding out her hands in front of her. Focus on her hands,

4 Images, no duds.

Hands doing something? Yup:

closeup photo of a woman’s elegant and manicured hands. She’s cutting carrots on a kitchen top, focus on hands,

There were some bloopers with this one but the hands always came out decent.

Ouch!

Do I hear “what about feet?”. Shush Quentin! But sure, it can do those too:

No prompt, it’s embarrassing. 😉

Heels?

I got you, fam.

The ultimate combo, hands and feet?

4k quality photo, a woman holding up her bare feet, closeup photo of feet,

So the soles of feet were very hit and miss (more miss actually, this was the best and it still gets the toenails wrong) and closeups have a tendency to become blurry and artifacted, making about a third of the images really bad.

But enough about extremities, what about anime? Well… it’s ok:

highly detailed anime, a female pilot wearing a bodysuit and helmet standing in front of a large mecha, focus on the female pilot,

Very consistent but I don’t think we can retire our ponies quite yet.

Let’s talk artist styles then. I tried my two favorites, naturally:

a fantasy illustration in the ((style of Frank Frazetta)), a female barbarian standing next to a tiger on a mountain,

and

an attractive female samurai in the (((style of Luis Royo))),

I love the result for both of them and the two batches I made were consistently very good but when it comes to the style of the artists… eh, it’s kinda sorta there like a dim memory but not really.

So what about more general styles? I’ll go back to one that I tried with SD3 and it failed horribly:

a cityscape, retro futuristic, art deco architecture, flying cars and robots in the streets, steampunk elements,

Of all the images I generated, this is the only one that really disappointed me. I don’t see enough art deco or steampunk. It did better than SD3 but it’s not quite what I envisioned. Though kudos for the flying cars, they’re really nice.

Ok, so finally, text. It does short text quite well, so I’m not going to bore you with that. Instead, I decided to really challenge it:

The cover of a magazine called “AI-World”. The headline is “Flux beats SD3 hands down!”. The cover image is of an elegant female hand,

I’m not going to lie, that took about 25+ attempts but dang did it get there in the end. And obviously, this is my conclusion about the model as well. It’s highly capable and though I’m afraid finetuning it will be a real pain due to the size, you owe it to yourself to give it a go if you have the GPU. Loading it in 8 bit will run it on a 16GB card, maybe somebody will find a way to squeeze it onto a 12GB in the future. And it’s already been done. 😉

P.S. if you’re wondering about nudity, it’s not quite as resistant as SD3 but it has an… odd concept of nipples. And I’ll leave it at that. EDIT: ok, if you really want to know, this is the best I could manage (content warning: nudity, don’t click if you don’t want to see it) https://gifyu. com/image/S5aHV (remove the space for the actual link)