This is an experiment to test the abilities of what NovelAI can do in terms of reproducing different mythological creatures, gods and entities. In this experiment I tried a total of 1473 different creatures using the exact same prompt and the exact same settings in terms of seed, scale, steps, options and output size. Most of these creatures come from a Wikipedia article called List of legendary creatures with hundreds of different creatures, but I’ve also added a few that were missing along with a whole bunch of different Lovecraftian creatures.
I’d rather not think about how many hours I spent generating these images. But since the article had origin for most of the creatures, I decided to incorporate them in the final prompt for generating. The prompt is:
Picture of a XXXX creature known as {{{{YYYY}}}}
Model used is NAI Diffusion Anime (Full), Steps 28, Scale 11, Quality Tags On, Seed 2468446987, Undesired Content Low Quality + Bad Anatomy.
So, if the image underneath says Tomte (Scandinavian) the actual prompt was Picture of a Scandinavian creature known as {{{{Tomte}}}}. Out of the 1473 prompts tried I got a total of 342 usable images. The process of sifting through the images was long and tedious since I needed to compare most of the images to source material to determine if it was an actual representation of the creature or just something NovelAI dreamed up. After a while I learned how to easily see if it was a novel generation or just a generic one though.
A lot of the animals here look strange and weird and “Wrong”, this is not as much due to the model as it has to do with the fact that some creatures just don’t work with some seeds. The idea with this list is not to show which creatures look good or not, since that’s heavily seed dependent, but rather if they’re reproducible at all. I’ve kept one single seed in case anyone want to reproduce my results, but if you see a creature you want to try and it doesn’t look good with my supplied seed, just generate a couple of new ones to see how they turn out.