VAE for creating pixel art with perfectly square pixels. This creates 4x4 pixels, see my older model for 8x8 pixels.
Since this is a VAE it will not affect the image generation in any way and will work with all models using the standard SDXL VAE, such as Pony, Illustrious, NoobXL, etc.. While this model does bias the image towards a pixel art style, you should use prompting and/or Lora's to push it to a specific pixel art style for best results.
If you want to use this VAE for Lora training, you should disable the caching of image latents since I have only trained the decoder, the encoder is stock.
Description
Improved training set and tweaked loss function to improve quality and reduce color changes.
FAQ
Comments (2)
Looking forward to playing around with the new version!
Something I noticed in the original x4 version is that it tends to produce ringing artifacts, sort of like what you'd see in an over-sharpened image. The x8 does not have that issue.
Any chance this is fixed in 1.1?
Potentially. The V1.0 replicated some of the artifacts the original pixelation model I used for the training set had, including very ugly ringing at high contrast areas. Most images would look good, but certain images would give really ugly results. Those artifacts have been greatly reduced, but since it is trained on top of V1.0 I'm not confident it is fully solved. (Training from scratch would likely be better, but V1.0 alone was 12+ hours and that could still benefit from more training.)
To be honest I haven't played too much with V1.1, so let me know if you still experience issues. If you can regenerate the image with the same seed, but with the standard VAE instead, I can use it for testing next time I feel like working on this.