Oekaki Process

Summer

call to adventure

I discuss Oekaki with haiku

Soooo. A looong time ago leancup pilled me on stable diffusion in milady village, it was very early still in AI art, a new anime model just released, we didn't even have .safetensors files. People used hypernetworks and textual inversions to train stuff locally, so the technology was very kinda early (think sd 1.4-1.5 at that time).

I've became a friend of haiku, we released a tiny lil Ghiblady side collection (strawberry juice) that financed me getting a solid GPU and Back then AI projects were just simple img2img and hand curation (if you were not lazy, we were and still are obsessive about curation), but I wanted something else. Those hand-curated projects where essentially 1/1s, but I am interested in generative art, so I thought, what if we make a generative pfp project that recombines prompt-traits and drawn traits for a truly generative NFT? A synthesis of artist and AI.

Thats when I found a nifty lil textual inversion on some 4chan ai thread (chan sites often are the most early on exploring new cool things), which is now lost to time. I was prompt engineering a lot, and I disliked the super-slick semi-realism goonercore AI gens that are still prevalent to this day, so I developed the idea to create an generative AI project that doesn't look like AI gens at that point in time and dmed Haiku the fateful words:

"btw h8 we also could do neo-oekaki miladies"

Supernatural aid

We onboard The Gang

Back then, I planned another project, which I never saw thru though. I trained a hypernet on balljoint-dolls and wanted to do bjd miladies. Ina was part of that group that was interested in making the project and Ina was also a friend of haiku, having worked with him before. So we onboarded Ina (bambina) because i also knew it would be a big hit under her aesthetic vision.

Leancup and Tubydart were both team members of Ghiblady, so Haiku got both of them in the team too. We also got some assistance of Atticus/Egrevore from Pixelady for a couple traits.

Shoutout to the old and original chatgpt, back then before the release of 4, honestly chatgpt was sooooo good it didn't yap or moralize and it could actually solve coding problems tf is OAI cooking fr. We used it often to ask it questions and back then it did seem like they were incrementally making it dumber (censoring it) as it got more popular.

Autumn

threshold

Work begins

So the Big Work begins. The Gang starts to create Assets and the Generator, I fiddled around with the Automatic1111 SD webui API and cobbled together a generator in Python, the rest created the hand-drawn assets. Haiku took a managerial role, working with me on the generator, creating a ton of assets (including hair) himself and directing work to the other members (big shoutout to Haiku).

beginning of transformation

technical details

We created a fairly intricate generator that we organized with github, that i creatively just named batch-process, which paired all traits with a trait picture, mask-images and behind-images and a prompt trait.

The images were then overlaid based on their position, with some extra elements appearing in lower hierarchies, based on the behind-images. For example, animal girl traits had to have their ears appear infront of the hair but the tail behind the body. Also, we had to use masking layers (with hand drawn black and white masks) to, for example, cut out hair when a hat trait was selected. Those recombined image traits also created a prompt trait for the stable diffusion API. The raw unbaked generative Oekaki images were then sent to the Automatic1111 img2img endpoint together with the generated text and then resized and slightly distorted for a Crunchy Look (the way Oekaki Maker looks is how we wanted it to look, like it was hand drawn in an Oekaki BBS / imperfect). All the generated info was then saved in a .json file, which we then used as the NFT metadata (after transforming it a little). When the batch of generated Oekakers was done, a cute done.wav played to signify to us that the Oekaki Batch Process was done (it took a while to run).

We generated a BOATLOAD (100,000) of oekaki and hand-curated and filtered down to 5555 (ina was the primary curator).

Curation was a lot of work, and we have a ton of gens that never saw the light of day, which honestly is kinda sad because those 100k have some really epic Girls, but we decided on abt 5k and that was that. It was fun to watch inaur filter kakis, she said that 'those aren't making it out of the hood' and some other slurs that i shant repeat !

Again, it was fairly early, this was before controlnets and LoRAs and all that fancy stuff, all we had was img2img, some kinda Anything and cafe.ckpt 70/30-ish merge, a gold-nugget of a textual inversion, some ambition, and an Epic Team.

challenges and temptations

design choices

So we started to work on this like mad, right? For the most part we all had a similar vision, locked the fuck in, on how Oekaki Maker should look like, but we started to deviate here and there, make too much traits of one thing and not enough of the other, so we had to step in and really, really streamline our vision.

I personally felt the need to really define what was Oekaki (in our context);

around 2020-2022 a silly internet style developed on twitter in what I've coined nu-oekaki, a movement that is heavily influenced by the 2000s culture. Artists like Snale or Aui helped popularize the style, which often incorporated nostalgic visual elements from older anime, like azumanga daioh, lain, etc. Contemporary internet culture is a big leitmotiv, with themes like mcdonalds, mental illness (bpd, autism, self-harm), terminally online, blackpill, etc.

Milady progressed 20s e-culture ideas while letting go of old blackpill-cel ideology and embracing earlier lighthearted silliness and jestercore vibes while still being recognizable as very online. Milady pushed forward aesthetically, creating a new visual landscape, capturing y2k orientalist themes, neatly bringing a lot of very online communities together under one visual aesthetic. 2022 milady summer was DOPE, you had to be there.

Milady is more hypercontemporary while Oekaki is a little 'regressive', taking up the older ideas that influenced Milady, like for example mcdonalds femcel lainism, condensing it and creating a contrasting minimalist aesthetic. Of note is that Oekaki Maker used bleeding edge toolchains to create its art, similarly to how 20s e-culture used contemporary platforms and technology to propagate its aesthetic.

Our visual influence are early /f/ and /i/ boards, egirls, emo/scene, as well as newgrounds or heisei era anime, such as azumanga daioh, rozen madiden, yotsuba&!, full metal panic? fumoffu, chobits, higurashi, touhou, katawa shoujo, vocaloid, lucky star, k-on, the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya, toradora!, angel beats, popotan, the list goes on really.

We wanted to evoke a sense of early-web innocence, when the internet was still relatively new. Oekaki Art and the accompanying imageboard culture were a reflection of this, with much of the content being playful and lighthearted.

So when we started to deviate from the Vision, the gang sat down to really define the four Cores of Oekaki:

Otaku, Dark, Cute and Silly.

Otaku was the core for the heisei-anime inspired traits and kemono traits, Dark was for emo/scene/goth blood darkpill traits, Cute was for soft girl and coquette babygirl traits and silly was for western web references and drainy traits.

Now with being able to make permutations of those, we had a strong visual language that combined all the Cores with a meaningful aesthetic. Me and ina filtered all our traits on new years eve, i remember exactly getting that bread while my irls were out partying, i was studying the Oekaki.

Winter

revelation

Troubles

We worked really really fucking hard, every day. I was sleep deprived and got a silent migraine aura that KOed me for one day, Ina cried multiple times and got a Stye at Oekaki Launch. At the end we all were Tweaking fr XD but it was worth it of course.

mint and duplicates

It turned out that the final shuffle script that was made poorly so it created some dupes ! So we paused the mint for a minute while we fixed the problem. The mistake is what led Haiku to create a bunch of standardized and battle tested scripts (which he then developed into the webtools) for everything for scatter dot art. Oekaki took some stray bullets but we were pretty sillypilled abt it all and had maximum fun (with some trauma bonding). We made sure all was right and everyone was happy even if the launch was rough!

death & rebirth

Ina gets a Stye from Stress

Spring

Transformation

Mintout happens smoothly

we minted out. we did it. we never had a doubt not even a whisper of worry. the great ppl of oekaki connect rejoiced in victory as we walked hand in hand through the blockchaine.

Though the team worked on other projects together before, Oekaki Maker was the genesis event of Oekaki Connect as an organization.

Atonement

We build a lovely community

The community started quite small and was a bit apprehensive at first. It was the first day of school and everyone was feeling a little shy. it was a stand off at the start, but it started to take on the style of our group chat. legit though not many people talking at first so we would all post cat gifs and this evolved to convos. Our only rule for the chat was to keep things beautiful and cute, fun and not crude and ofc to cool it gifs (insert patrick bateman gif). Strangers beccame friends oldfriends met newfriends. Also friends who we had met in mv (milady village) in the 2021/22 era had joined. Even john scatter and his crew joined (thanked mister john scatter). The boat started to leave shore and It was all very friend ship from that point forward (team boat mentioned).

AI Generative lainpilled artisanal BBS sketches hand curated by a highly trained and dedicated group. Why stop there? Why not make our own bbs? After all, the bbs style informed the art of Oekaki Maker, so it was natural fit. Yep, lets give ppl a platform to have fun drawing and even hold a contest or two. Well well well, we did just that, and it even spawned some cute emojis used in the server to this day. In fact, we gave away Oekaki Maker (nft technology tokens) for parts of drawings from early contests used (proof of cute mined) for stickers and emotes ! That is real and true.

https://bbs.oekakiconnect.net/

There is a certain presence on the TL of Oekaki Connect that started with Ghiblady and was more fully realized during Oekaki Maker. (Disclaimer: all memes and art come from the network) Okay, with that little disclaimer out of the way, maybe you have found a meme? a post or two on x dot com (the everything app) or even our discord? Well the memes for Oekaki Maker were mostly lovingly made by tuby (vessel) using a cutesy, non chalant, fun pilled top text/bottom text approach. In a recent interview (unpublished) Haiku stated that this social presence, 'informed the voice of the collection'.

Gift of the Godess

Kittykaki

Some Oekaki Maker characters emerged after the mint with a certain star power. They took on their own life and set themselves apart. Discord members gave them cute names and lore. The first of which was Kittykaki (Oekaki #4272). This was organic and grew naturally from within the community. It was decided that give the blue haired cat girl (kittykaki) a real life. She is a plusher and our first one of many at that! Many of the other Oekaki Connect characters (friends) grew out of the whirlwind of Oekaki Maker lore, they became characters with personalities informed by that lore.

Return

Epilogue

Now we are here in the end of 2024 and Oekaki Connect, the little Online Guild, Artist- and Creator Collective and Multisig is booming in multiple ways. Oekaki Maker is as of this writing 695 days old and has developed a significant following of collectors who love these binches. AI keeps chudding on, with new models and techniques dropping regularly. It's unbelievable that the tech we built this with (crusty ass sd 1.4 based models, A1111, textual inversions) is already very outdated, nowadays I'd train a lowrank adapter and would use a controlnet instead of img2img, for example.

AI art is all over the internet, but no one else has yet made art like Oekaki Maker again, no one thought or put in the effort to synthesize human and machine art in the same way we imagined and realized.

We were so early, and yet we still are.

Clementine

Oekaki Connect

p.s. shouts out to jumon for his epic Oekaki Babies article go read it!