Niji Journey: How to create incredible anime images (Midjourney's Niji Mode)

Niji Journey is the anime specific version of Midjourney. It does anime-style generations much better than Midjourney, but is also stronger than Midjourney at a few non-anime related tasks.

Niji Journey vs Niji Mode

Niji Journey and Niji Mode refer to the same generator, but different ways to access it.

Existing Midjourney users can toggle Niji Mode by adding "--niji" to their prompt when they message the Midjourney bot.

Niji Journey on the other hand refers to the Niji Discord server which has its own bot, the Niji Journey Bot.

Messaging the Niji Journey Bot will yield the same result as messaging the Midjourney Bot with the command "--niji" (with the same prompt).

The Niji Journey Discord

When you join the Niji Journey Discord, you'll see that everything works the exact same way as the Midjourney Discord.

If you are on a paid plan, you will be able to message the Niji Journey bot privately.

We definitely prefer this, as your images don't get lost in the chaos of multiple people prompting at the same time.

Adding the niji · journey Bot to your own server

You can add the niji · journey Bot to your own server now.

Just click on the bot's name in the Niji Journey Discord, then click Add to Server.

The Midjourney Bot and --niji

If you prefer to keep all your generations in one place, you can just message the Midjourney bot with "--niji".

You can also type "/settings" to set it as the default so you don't have to type out --niji every time.

How to prompt

Compared to Midjourney V4, Niji Journey requires longer prompts to get better results. Short prompts are usually a lot harder to get right.

Check out these 10 other great prompts.

--ar 2:3 and --ar 3:2 refer to the aspect ratios. This is great for cinematic landscape (3:2) or poster-like (2:3) effects. Currently you cannot use any other aspect ratios.

Generating Characters

Since Niji is an anime generator, one of the first things we wanted to try was existing anime characters.

We noticed that some characters came out consistently every single time (no doubt due to the high quantity of fanart used to train the model):

• Rei Ayanami from Evangelion
• Asuka Langley Soryu from Evangelion
• Rin Tohsaka from Fate/stay night
• Saber from Fate/stay night
• Zero Two from Darling in the Franxx
• Sasuke from Naruto

A very general rule of thumb: the more fanart you think exists of the character, the more likely the model will be able to generate them well.

A good way to check the popularity of various characters is to use Danbooru, the largest anime imageboard in the world. If a character has a substantial number of images (check here for the most popular characters) they are guaranteed to come out well, because Danbooru is a large part of Niji Journey's training data.

Starting From an Existing Image

We noticed that one of the most powerful things that Niji Journey does (and does better than Midjourney) is generate images based off of existing images.

How does this work?

1. Take an artwork that you love
2. Ask Niji Journey to generate something new using that image inside your prompt

Here's what that looks like in action:

Let's say we want to use the style of the image above. But we want our generated image to be of an existing character.

We send it to the bot so we can have a link to the image, then right click -> "Copy Link" to create a link for that image)

If the image is from online, you can use the regular image link directly, without sending it to the bot.

Paste your image link as the first part of the prompt. It will look something like this:

Then, let the magic begin:

You can see the generation takes different elements from the original image and merges them with the character (Rei from Evangelion) every single time. And you get varied results with every generated, where different bits and pieces from the input artwork and from the existing character get used every time.

We can change the character to anyone:

As we mentioned above, some characters work better than others, because the model has been trained on more images of them.

We don't even have to use an existing character. We can generate completely new characters and concepts by tweaking the part after the image prompt:

Starting From Any Image

The starting image you use doesn't have to be anime art. Stretch your imagination to its full limit and use a picture you like for any reason!

We love the colors and illustrated style of this poster. And now we're going to give it to Niji Journey to generate Anime art on steroids:

We will always be impressed at the ways that Niji Journey has pulled apart the original image, taking objects, colors, script, layouts, then transposing and compositing them in fantastically appealing ways.

It's as if over time the AI is not just getting better at recognizing things, but understanding our aesthetic preferences.

Niji Journey's Future

Cixelyn, a Niji Journey team member has made the following comment on Reddit, when asked about the team's long term plans:

Midterm, we’re beefing up our internal game studio to bring one of the first truly AI-powered games to market. You can get a high-level sense of where we want our next production to go by poking around our team’s first title, Arrowmancer.

Long term… hmmm. I don’t think Gendo gave out all the secrets this early in the season 🙂

A Niji Journey team member reports that Niji Journey is built on similar architecture to Midjourney's newest version, and uses Midjourney's supercluster (supercomputer) for training.

The team reports that even better models are coming down the pipeline, and users should be prepared for massive quality improvements.

This is astonishing, because the quality we saw in Niji Journey results was already incredible.

Frequently Asked Questions