OppAIs - Part III: Models (Checkpoints) (Patreon)

It's time we started looking at one of the most interesting parts of using SD: the models. 

When you go out to download an SD model, you are really downloading a checkpoint. A checkpoint is a point in the training process of a machine learning model where the current state of the model is saved.

Checkpoints can also be used to refine a model by using it on a different dataset, for example, all those models trained on a specific dataset, such as anime characters: NovelAI, Waifu Diffusion, AbyssOrangeMix2 and AnythingV3.

Now, where can you get checkpoints?

I know of two websites, and I use them frequently: 

https://huggingface.co/ and https://civitai.com/ 

Personally, I recommend using Civitai and these are my reasons:

• It is very user friendly
• Sample images (often including prompts)
• You can read the opinions of other users
• Includes an extremely useful filter

So, why don't we open the website and download a checkpoint?

This is what I see when I visit the site for the first time:

If you look carefully, there is an icon to the right of the "All time" dropdown:

That is the filter select, where we can search for something specific (and get other things out of the way).

Go ahead and check the "checkpoint" option.

From now on, everything you see will be checkpoints, exactly what we are interested in testing.

I want to follow this tutorial using the "AnyTwam" checkpoint, so I will look for it directly:

Click on the checkpoint you want and you will see it's page.

This page includes everything I said a little earlier. Read the description, the comments and look at the pictures. Don't overlook anything! Why? Because many times, the creator of the checkpoint gives indications of use that, if you overlook, will get you bad results.

For example, this user recommends the use of the VAE kl-f8-anime2(BerryMix) that you can download at: https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4/blob/main/vae/kl-f8-anime2.ckpt 

If you decided to use the same checkpoint as me, go and download that VAE.

I also invite you to download the model of your choice from their page by clicking on the "Download Latest" button:

I will take a moment to highlight something very important: the checkpoints whose extension is .safetensor are safer than those that have the .ckpt cause the second one can contain malicious code. You can see that this model has a .safetensor extension cause it says so under the download button.

Okay, open your stable-diffusion-webui directory and go to the models directory. You'll see something like this:

The VAE directory (second from bottom to top) is where you want to put all your VAEs. On the other hand, the Stable-diffusion directory is where you will place your checkpoints.

So, go ahead and copy both files instead. Then, open the webui as I showed you in the previous tutorial.

Now! Let's make your life a bit easier by configuring some extra UI elements on the webui.

First of all, click on "Settings":

Now click on "User Interface" on the left sidebar:

Copy the following text on the Quicksettings list textfield:

sd_model_checkpoint, sd_vae, sd_hypernetwork, CLIP_stop_at_last_layers, sd_hypernetwork_strength

Apply the settings and restart the webui. After that, you should be able to see these options at the top of the webui:

Go ahead and click the first option and select your new checkpoint. Do the same thing on the VAE.

Wait a few minute while the web-ui downloads and configures everything and... done! You should be able to use the new checkpoint. Allowing you to get new results from your prompts.

In the next tutorial, we will talk about some settings and configurations that will allow you to get different results, bigger (or smaller) resolutions, steps, sampling methods aaaaand many other things! In the meantime, go ahead and test new models.