> I have this character design project for a local indie game dev that needs to be finished by Friday Honestly, I was in your shoes last month and Leonardo.ai Artisan Plan Cloud Subscription saved my life! Their Alchemy V2 engine is incredible for fixing that waxy look you hate. It handles anatomy way better than MJ because you can pick specialized models. I paid 30 bucks for the month and finished my whole sprite sheet in two days! Seriously, give it a shot... its a total game changer for pros!

In my experience over the years working with generative tools, Midjourney has definitely developed a distinct, sometimes frustrating "look" that doesnt always fit professional game dev. If you need something for character design by Friday, you should look into web-based platforms that host Stable Diffusion models so you dont have to worry about your laptop hardware. I have tried many options, and for high-end digital art that actually respects anatomy, I recommend Leonardo.ai Creative Suite Platform. The best tip I can give you is to use their Leonardo.ai Vision XL Model combined with the Image Guidance tool. Midjourney often fails because it is guessing at the structure, but with Leonardo, you can upload a rough sketch or a pose reference to force the AI to follow specific anatomical lines. This basically eliminates the weird hands issue. Also, make sure to use their Negative Prompt box to specifically list things like plastic skin, waxy texture, extra fingers to avoid that AI filter look. Another solid choice is using OpenAI DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT Plus for the initial concepting because its natural language processing is superior for complex descriptions, tho it can sometimes look a bit too clean. For the actual game assets tho, the XL models on Leonardo are much closer to that hand-painted look youre after. It provides high-level control without needing an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GPU to run it locally. Its basically the pro move when you need consistency on a deadline.

Agreeing with the previous post, web tools are much easier on your hardware. Just be careful with a few things that usually trip people up:

• avoid generic descriptors like hyper-detailed which can actually muddy the textures
• dont push your guidance scale too high or faces get distorted
• make sure you arent over-complicating your initial character descriptions Keep at it, youll definitely find a flow that works for that game dev project.

Same here!

+1

Huh interesting. I had no idea. The more you know I guess 🤷