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Part 2

We've reached the space hotel at last!

It feels great to get another one of these done. They take a long time, but their fun and I'm committed at this point. It's looking like there will be 3 parts total, so the next one will be the last.

For all of the space hotel pictures, I knew it would be hard to sell the concept of them staying at a space themed hotel along their journey, but I kind of wrote myself into a corner in the previous story. It may not come across, but the idea is that they visited an immersive space themed hotel, not that they actually traveled to space. That was part of why I added the postcard. But I still don't know if that fully comes across.

For all but one of these images, I blended a few versions together and did manual painting and clone stamping to get the final result.

The map is actually the same generation as last time, just flipped and with some areas clone stamped to make it look a bit different.

Here's a bit (OK, it's more than a bit) about each picture going from left to right

Picture of them together:

This is pretty similar to the image of them together from the last part, but I felt that if they were going to this cool space themed hotel, which they were both looking forward to, they would want to have a picture together. You can't see it in the cropped Polaroid format, but I liked the idea of Tuxley standing on something next to his mom. It makes the composition nicer and gives some wiggle room in terms of his relative height consistency with the prior one.

I went through a lot of generations for this before forcing myself to pick one. I didn't quite get the impressive cool space lobby I wanted, but I like this one well enough. As someone who gets rid of jeans as soon as the knees start to fray, his mom's shredded jeans bother me a bit, but I forgot to add that to the negative prompt in this one and didn't want to spend more time fixing them. At least the rips turned out grey and not human flesh colored like they sometimes do. Still, if she shows up again, I'm making her throw those things out.

Space Hotel Room:

I absolutely love this one. Definitely my favorite of the bunch and among my favorites I've ever made. The sense of wonder and awe, and how he's just the happiest kid. He definitely came out looking young in this one, which I also like. I think a lot of that youthfulness comes from the pose. This was also the one I had to do the least post-gen work on, so that was nice.

Space Hotel Pool:
The big takeaway from this one especially was that I sometimes go for too many concepts at once. These Stable Diffusion models can't really do nuanced depiction of too many themes or ideas in one image. In this instance we have an anthro wolf and two anthro otters trying to ride an inflatable rocket ship in a pool at an elaborately space themed hotel. That's a lot of things to convey. I'm amazed this came out as coherent as it is, but it took ages.

In hindsight, it would have been much easier and smarter to move this idea to a different part of their trip at a regular pool with a regular raft, or at least paired it down to two characters, but as soon as I thought of "The Tuxlian and the Space Otterties" I was committed. Plus at that time I didn't have the gift shop image idea yet, and I wanted some kind of other activity at the space hotel. I tried a space themed roller coaster and space mini golf, but those weren't turning out well.

Unlike the others, I generated this one as a square. I realized early on having three characters in frame, then cropping down to a square wasn't going to work.

Space Hotel Gift Shop

This was a late addition. I just thought it would be fun to put him in a space helmet. There's a different version I almost went with where instead of smiling he looked more thoughtful. I called it his "I really want this but it's probably expensive so I'm afraid to ask for it" look. But the little snaggletoothed smile won out. This environment definitely looks the most "normal" of the 4 space hotel pictures, which I'm OK with. It balances out the other ones that just look like actual space. Though I do wish it looked a bit more like a gift shop and less like a kind of dingy supermarket.

Space Hotel Postcard
As stated above, this was partially done to sell the fact that the hotel isn't actually in space. That said, I struggled with what the outside of the hotel should look like. As far as I know the closest we have to this in our world is the Station Cosmos hotel in France, which looks awesome. But I couldn't get anything to look quite like that. Maybe I just wasn't using the right words. There's also, well, there was, the Disney Galactic Starcruiser, but that mostly looked like a regular building from the outside.

I think what I landed on works well enough for what it is, but it does look a bit like it could actually be some other planet. Still, it's a postcard, so they would definitely try to oversell it.

Sorry again for my bad and hastily done graphic design.

Roadside Meal
I really liked the idea of them stopping some place in the middle of nowhere for a meal that ends up being amazing.

Sometimes Stable Diffusion is totally literal with what you ask for. In a lot of the gens I was getting, he was sitting on the side of a road. I liked the more patio vibe of this one. One thing that often happens with generating young characters is that Stable Diffusion doesn't always understand their scale relative to other objects. It's hard to get Tuxley not to look like he's an adult sized child, or like he's sitting at a tiny table. He still looks huge in this one, but at least his dangling legs help a bit. I added the other chair, which is why it looks so wonky, because the other half of the table was a bit of a mess.

Riding a Horse
For this one, the goal was deliberately not to get an action shot. All the early gens I was getting had him dramatically posed looking heroic on a rearing or galloping horse. That wasn't what I was going for at all. I wanted to capture that moment of a kid being put on a horse for the first time and having that moment of "Whoa, the ground is really far away!"

I had a number of false starts with different versions of this one. And I had to work a lot harder for it than I thought I would. I ended up having to do a ton of manual painting to fix issues and make the reins not a tangled mess of nonsense. I do wish I had gotten Gus, the horse's face more in frame, but sometimes Stable Diffusion feels like it almost spitefully never gives you everything you want. I also really tried to push how big the horse was to get away from the issue I mentioned earlier, where objects, like the horse, come out looking tiny compared to Tuxley.

Phew. That was a lot again. One day I'll be able to just put up an image and not a massive block of text. I hope someone out there likes hearing how I arrived at some of these results.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these. See you in Part 3