>>8914902
>realistic illustrious model
NoobAI. There's no reason to stay on illustrious if you're based on anime already, you're missing out on a ton of character and concept knowledge. Now, even though these are somewhat capable of realism normally, as soon as you dip into their anime knowledge it tends to push them away from realism and into uncanny valley. Left pic.

>using a refiner from an anime model
This has its own set of issue with color bias, lighting, character proportions, head to body ratio, huge eyes, etc. Imo it's usually obvious it was a "drawing" underneath. Maybe from a very realism-adjacent style. The advantage here is you don't lose any knowledge compared to the more realistic anime ones. They tend to sacrifice some in the process of retraining their base style.

I go from a realistic noob model to a proper realistic one, and use img2img instead of refiner to allow use of controlnet. Right pic. Main downside is those models struggle with even basic anime features, like purple eyes or drill hair, and will try hard to remove them from your image. Controlnet helps with some of that, or inpainting those features separately afterwards.

>>8914998
This, and even for proper realistic ones it depends on whether it was trained on airbrushed insta thots, brazzers, or a more reasonable dataset.