Recent Posts

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News and Updates / Email Issues

« Last post by JG on Today at 09:17:08 am »

It has been brought to my attention that registrants are not receiving the registration validation email. Further testing has concluded that private messages are also not being sent.

I don't really know what the problem is. The emails are just sitting there without moving forward. I've rebooted the server and I've tested sending emails directly from the Outlook account and don't yet know what the problem is, as there's no record in the log of SMTP failures - they just aren't getting sent or moving out of queue. This may take a while to figure out the root cause and fix.

In the meantime, if you have recently registered and did not get your validation email, please send an email to sognadigitalmuseum@gmail.com from the email account you are trying to register and your registration will be completed manually. Apologies for the disruption of service and extra manual step.

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VIPER Galleries / Re: VIPER AI

« Last post by JG on Today at 08:19:34 am »

I've started seeing some VIPER AI images on Pixiv over the last year or so. (And a few posted here as well.)
It seems to be getting closer, especially for the faces though Cala's unusual hair is rarely done right and the Rise girl's clothing is often wrong or miscolored as I think it tends to confuse the Anne Mitter's uniform with other, similar styles.

I had not heard of anyone using AI to plug in uncensored parts to otherwise original art though. What I'd seen of this before was presumably handmade or used assets from other series copied onto the original. It would be great to see some of this, too to know if it looks any better than the handmade or copy-paste uncensoring.

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VIPER Galleries / Re: VIPER AI

« Last post by uphillbattle on Today at 02:41:37 am »

I knew it was only a matter of time until AI generated Viper images would be done. The days of crude looking and poorly pieced together results from combining existing images and gifs into new gifs and images are practically over lol.

They look great btw! The V16 Rise girls especially; that Karin though , though I'd say the Cala images from the AI could use a little work. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only person one here who can identify many of the images that have been used/referenced or which characters have been combined. Makes me feel like an expert 

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VIPER Galleries / Re: VIPER AI

« Last post by redhome on Yesterday at 04:14:44 pm »

And here's a short preview on the RSR based LoRA. The inputs were mostly censored, so I need to uncensor them before training the LoRA again. Plus, the input were not "tagged" correctly (you need to tag the contents of an image, to let the "AI" know what it needs to learn and what to ignore).

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VIPER Galleries / VIPER AI

« Last post by redhome on Yesterday at 04:09:34 pm »

Hi there! Still new here and I thought maybe some of you (even if the topic itself might be controversial) could be interested in something I am working on right now - or already worked on, to be honest. It also includes shameless self promotion.

One of my hobbies (and partly my profession, too) is AI research, which also includes creating the basis of what you would call "AI models" to generate either text or images. I am not overly sciency about it and some of you might already have worked in that field in one way or another. Since I am also a really big fan of the VIPER series (for obvious reasons), I thought I could give it a spin and created a so called "LoRA" (https://github.com/microsoft/LoRA) of the VIPER Rise series. It's a tedious process, but in the end you are able to create really neat images, which are not identical, but very close to the original (artworks). In my case it's a "style" (others are "character", "clothing" etc. or really any concept you can imagine).

If you like, you may visit my VIPER Rise style LoRA here at Civitai and give it a spin yourself (https://civitai.com/models/420185). If you own a beefy graphics card, you can even do that 100% locally. Currently, I am working on a new "style LoRA" based on the RSR artworks/games.

Funny thing I noticed: I can easily "uncensor" original artworks/game images using something called "inpainting" and utilizing my LoRA (mentioned above). This is either done in the various web UIs (a1111, forge, ...) or by using "Krita" (https://krita.org/en/) with the so called diffusion plugin (https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion). If you're interested, you can just reach out to me.

Here are some sample images I created.

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Collections & Acquisitions / Re: New High Prices for Viper Artwork

« Last post by JG on Yesterday at 10:48:00 am »

Well, I mean it doesn't help within your own market. But US dollars and British Pounds (and to a bit lesser extent, Euro as well) should have greater buying power in Japan. Five years ago if I wanted to buy something priced 5000 yen, I'd expect to pay about $45 USD. Now I can buy it for about $32. So all this art that used to start about 20,000 yen used to be about $180 and should now be about $130. Instead its approaching twice that for even the cheapest art (I'd say 35,000 is the new floor)

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Collections & Acquisitions / Re: New High Prices for Viper Artwork

« Last post by uphillbattle on April 29, 2024, 11:22:53 pm »

Games, art books, and most figurines have pretty much stayed in the same price range for the last 10 years or so. Its really only the original art and telephone cards that seem to be accelerating upwards.

And with the Japanese yen dropping like a ten ton weight over the last couple of years compared to dollar (see attachment), we westerners really should be seeing better prices now than we did, but we aren't. People just gone crazy I guess.

I wish that were so, but my cost of living has gone up dramatically the past few years, practically offsetting any better pricing we aren’t seeing, so its actually been worse for me personally 

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Collections & Acquisitions / Re: New High Prices for Viper Artwork

« Last post by JG on April 29, 2024, 07:41:05 pm »

Games, art books, and most figurines have pretty much stayed in the same price range for the last 10 years or so. Its really only the original art and telephone cards that seem to be accelerating upwards.

And with the Japanese yen dropping like a ten ton weight over the last couple of years compared to dollar (see attachment), we westerners really should be seeing better prices now than we did, but we aren't. People just gone crazy I guess.

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Collections & Acquisitions / Re: New High Prices for Viper Artwork

« Last post by uphillbattle on April 29, 2024, 07:25:31 pm »

right, a lot of CTR pieces which are very basic and non unique seem to still go for prices well beyond I can/would pay. CTR must have been very popular in Japan. Once I saw those going for the prices they were getting, I knew it was going to be another folly to try and bid on anything. 

speaking of.. Yowza!  that is one expensive teleca! That one snuck by me. It's literally an in-game frame with teleca info slapped over it!! The seller only had to post a single low quality front picture for people to go bonkers over it; didn't even put up a picture of the back of it.


All of this just solidifies our conclusion all along with Sogna material.
If it's very rare at all it will always go for a very high amount, and if it happens to be a promotional art piece, be prepared to pay a premium on top of that, and if it's an H-scene period (In-game frame or not) be prepared to pay an absolutely insane premium. 

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Collections & Acquisitions / Re: New High Prices for Viper Artwork

« Last post by JG on April 29, 2024, 02:06:58 pm »

Yeah, and a couple of them weren't even good pictures in my opinion. Neither the Lilia photo nor the Miki ending wearing bath towel seemed particularly worth the money they got. The Miki heart shirt looked to be better quality then either of those two but went for less (but still north of $200.) The others were all in the several hundred dollar range.

I was in on the colored Ruri cel up to 35,000 yen but tapped out at that point and let the other bidder have it for slightly above that amount (35,800 final price.) I thought it was good art, colored, and a lesser known character drawn by one of the lesser known artists in the series, so I rightly suspected it would be the best deal. But I didn't like it enough to keep bidding upwards on it.

I kind of expected the Rise cat girl art to be highly desirable, and sure enough it was. I'd have loved that art, but expected it to be well beyond what I wanted to pay for it (and was.)


Frankly, I was more surprised that one of the rare RSR telecas was also on Yahoo Auctions ending this morning and topped out at a staggering 101,000 yen, blowing way past the previous 40,600 record I'd seen on the Series 3 art book cover teleca. The previous two times I'd seen this RSR teleca were a more modest (and reasonable) 5,000 and 8,000 yen. I really don't see how anyone can pay $650-ish for a single teleca, given how small they are and non-uniqueness. Clearly anything very rare in VIPER world is just skyrocketing in premium pricing, if even telecas are now topping 100K.