Pallas Cat (Otocolobus manul) — Wildlife Photo Style: v2.0: pallascat_v1-000006.safetensors

v2 — Side-Profile Update

v2 adds 52 side-profile and dynamic-motion images on top of the v1

dataset (134 total) to address the front-face overfitting issue

documented in Part 2 of the Pallas Cat AI Pipeline Study

(Finding #8 — overfit chimera, front-face-on-side-body).

### What v2 improves over v1

- Side-profile and 3/4 angle generations are anatomically correct

- Reduced front-face chimera at later epochs (epoch 4 final)

- Better motion poses: walking, jumping, turning

### Where v1 is still better

- Front-facing tight portrait shots (v1 was overfit on these,

which paradoxically makes them more polished)

- Anything where you want the v1 "tight ruff close-up" baseline look

v1 is not deprecated — both versions remain available and

trade in opposite directions.

### Known v2 limitations

- Multi-tail artifacts at certain camera angles (~5–10% of generations)

- Dynamic motion drifts at CFG > 5.5

- Best results at strength 0.75–0.85

### Recommended settings

- Base: SDXL 1.0

- LoRA strength: 0.75–0.85

- Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras

- Steps: 28–32

- CFG: 3.5–4.5

- Resolution: 832×1216 (vertical) or 1024×1024 (square)

### Trigger

pallas cat, Otocolobus manul

(same as v1 — no migration needed)

### Part 3 of the series uses v2 in a 5-way video model comparison.

Article and full eval grid linked in the project repo.

# Pallas Cat (Otocolobus manul) — SDXL v1

A LoRA for generating photorealistic Pallas cats — a rare wild

felid native to Central Asia, frequently mis-rendered by base

models as tiger, snow leopard, or generic gray cat.

## Usage

- Trigger: pallas cat, Otocolobus manul

- Recommended weight: 0.7 – 0.9

- Best results: front-facing portraits, sitting poses,

natural wildlife photography contexts

- Known limitation: side-profile and dynamic poses can produce

"anatomical chimeras" (front-face on side-body) — see the v2

notes in the linked article. v2 will address this.

## Sample prompts

pallas cat, Otocolobus manul, sitting on rock, looking at camera,
soft natural daylight, wildlife photography, photorealistic

## Training details

- Base: SDXL 1.0

- Dataset: 92 photographs (zoo livestream,

photographer portfolios)

- Rank 8, Alpha 1, 10 epochs, AdamW8bit

- Captioning strategy: variable elements only — trigger word absorbs

permanent species features

## Full write-up

Three findings I noticed during this training run — including a

chimera failure mode that more epochs don't fix — are written up at:

[Part 2 LinkedIn Article link]

## Attribution

Full photographer credits: [GitHub ATTRIBUTION.md link]

## v2 coming

v2 with diversified pose data is in training. Will be published

under this same model.