Problem it solves
Iterating on character art means hundreds of generations per concept, spread across seeds,
prompt revisions, LoRA weights and epochs. Reviewing that in a file explorer destroys both
speed and judgment: no context, no comparison, no record of why an image exists. Atelier
turns the folder-diving chore into a review workflow.
What it is
A local web app (FastAPI + SQLite backend, live-updating frontend) that every generation
driver reports into. To date it tracks 1,100+ batches / 4,100+ images across 8 projects,
organized as project → character → batch.
Design decisions that matter
- Every batch is ingested with its full generation record — the complete prompt, seed,
sampler settings and LoRA stack per image. Six weeks later I can answer “how exactly was
this made?” for any image on this site. No orphan outputs.
- Live gallery. New batches appear in the open browser within seconds of generation
finishing — no refresh, no re-navigation. Review happens during the run, not after.
- Styles as presets. A style bundles a base workflow, a LoRA stack with weights, prompt
rules and suggested settings. Validated recipes (e.g. “standard = epoch 10 @ 1.0”) become
one-click starting points instead of tribal knowledge.
- Comparison is a first-class view. Side-by-side compare across styles or checkpoints on
the same prompt — this is where epoch-sweep decisions actually get made.
- Picks and provenance. One-click picks mark the shortlist; batches can be reassigned as
characters get promoted from experiments to real projects. Deep links (
?character=…&batch=…)
make any review shareable with myself across sessions.
- Round-trips to the tools. Any image can reopen its exact ComfyUI graph in one click,
and upscale/face-detail actions run straight from the lightbox.
Why it exists
The pipeline claim of this whole site — directed, repeatable generation — is only true if
the operator can see, compare and trace everything. Atelier is what makes the discipline
cheap enough to actually practice.