Submission, Wrestling.
Control Net Series
In the dimly lit dungeon, a Roman gladiator reluctantly submitted to his opponent during their wrestling match. The sound of defeat reverberated in the air, as the defeated warrior’s spirit grew heavy with resignation.
These paintings are based on a painting I made a long time ago of two gladiators fighting in the Colosseum (last image in the set).
I have reimagined the painting, relocating the scene to a dungeon devoid of spectators, allowing for a profound connection between the two men. While the dungeon setting has proved successful, the portrayal of emotions between the victor and the defeated has fallen short of my expectations. I intend to revisit this in the future, striving to evoke a stronger sense of emotional intensity.
For post-processing, Stable Diffusion initially rendered the scene with balanced lighting. However, to achieve the desired effect of reducing background brightness, I made extreme adjustments. Working with an evenly lit source image provides greater flexibility in controlling values, similar to the practice of shooting movies with neutral color balance before adding color grading in post-production. It's essential to have a high-quality source to make significant adjustments, as starting with a dark background can result in insufficient shadow details extraction.
Following the same workflow as the previous two sets, I utilized a depth control net to refine the poses while using text prompts to modify the style and color. In future projects, I plan to employ a regional prompter to effectively separate the figures. However, I encountered challenges when using LoRAs with RP, which caused issues within the image. Once I find a solution to overcome this technical obstacle, I will resume working on this piece.
P.S. Normally, I would rendered paintings with DPM++ SDE or DPM++ SDE Karras, but these were rendered in Euler a, mostly because I prefer the look of it better than the SDE renders. For paintings that need smoother gradations, I find that Euler a with high steps work a lot better than SDE.
Tech: Text prompts with Stable Diffusion: 60 steps, Euler a, CFG 5, 512x512, Virile Fantasy v1.0, Denoising 0.5. ADetailer with prompts face_yolov8n.pt. Control Net Depth depth_midas, 1024 res, weight 0.7, start 0, end 0.5. Hires 1.5x (768x768), 30 steps, 4x_foolhardy_Remacri. Post: Topaz Gigapixel HQ 4x (3072x3072). Adobe Lightroom. Wrestling Singlet LoRA v1.
Images
Images
Gladiators Series
- 1Beach Fight 1v1
- 2Group Fight at the Beach (Study)