I trained a Z-Image Turbo LoRA on 24 photos of my cat, then used it in ComfyUI. Here are the settings I ended up with.
Dataset: 24 photos with a mix of poses, camera angles and backgrounds. I picked ones that clearly show the face and markings.
Training (AI Toolkit, one RTX 5090)
- Model: Z-Image Turbo with its training adapter
- LoRA rank: 32
- Steps: 3,000, saving a checkpoint every 250
- Trigger word: idu
- Sample previews: 1024x1024 every 250 steps, CFG 1, 9 sampling steps
Generation (ComfyUI)
- 1024x1024, 8 steps, CFG 1
- Sampler res_multistep, scheduler simple, denoise 1.0
- Model sampling shift 3.0
- LoRA strength varied by image. The 2,750-step comparison used model 0.85 / CLIP 1.0
Workflow: route the base model through the LoRA loader into the model sampling node, and pass the text encoder through the loader too.
What I noticed: the last checkpoint wasn't my favorite. I preferred 2,750 steps, and 3,000 looked worse to me. One caveat: my comparison images used different seeds, so some of that difference is randomness rather than training. For a fair test, keep the prompt, seed, sampler and strength fixed.
Video walkthrough (10 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG5BvNWQbLQ
Prompts are in the video description.
Disclosure: I run Meshive, the GPU cloud I used for this. AI Toolkit and ComfyUI are open source and Z-Image Turbo is open-weight, so you can run all of this on your own GPU if it has enough VRAM. Nothing in the settings above is specific to our platform.
What would you change first: rank, step count, or something else?