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CHARACTER SHEETS

A character lives or dies on its sheet. The video model reads it literally — it does not interpret, forgive, or average out. Every flaw in the sheet becomes a flaw in every shot made from it.

Four moves, always in this order

  1. 1GenerateMoodboard and description first, then ONE production prompt that packs every angle into a single generation.
  2. 2InspectBefore anything downstream touches it. A stray rim light, a mismatched face or plastic skin here bleeds into everything.
  3. 3Edit masked onto the originalFix flaws by compositing a patch onto the original sheet. Never regenerate the whole thing — drift and grime pile up.
  4. 4Test on a real shotThe test is the finish line, not the generation. A sheet is only good once something made from it holds.

Crop the head off the full-body panels

On a full-length panel the face is only a few dozen pixels tall, so it distorts and drifts from the portrait. Two faces that disagree give the model two identities to choose between, and it will pick differently shot to shot.

So remove them. With the heads cropped off the full-body panels, the face exists in exactly one place — the portrait, where the pixels and the precision are. The model has nowhere else to look, which is the entire point.

SIX RULES THAT MAKE A SHEET HOLD

Angle the portrait

Slightly off-frontal beats dead-on.

An angled head reads its own volume — the model learns the shape of the skull, not a flat mask. Dead-on gives it a picture; three-quarter gives it a head.

Eyes are never black

The iris colour must read clearly.

Crushed-black eyes carry no light information, so tone drifts between generations. The eyes are the highest-information region of a face and the first thing that betrays a drifting identity.

Catchlight, or dead eyes

There is always a glint, exactly as in a photograph.

Every real photograph of a person has one. Without it the face reads as embalmed, and that reading carries into every shot.

Break the symmetry

Real faces are near-symmetric and never perfectly so.

A mirrored face is the single most reliable tell of a synthetic image, and the model preserves and repeats it downstream. Asymmetry is not a flaw to fix — it is the evidence of a person.

No 3D-game-render look

Plastic, game-engine surfaces are contagious.

The model recognises that mood and animates the character like game footage — the motion goes wrong, not just the texture. It is one of the few sheet flaws that changes how the character MOVES.

Grey is the golden middle

Deep neutral grey, around #3a3a3c.

White bleeds into the video and washes out the location. Black eats the detail you are trying to supply. Grey does neither, which is why it is the one part of the template that never changes.

THE PRODUCTION TEMPLATE

Two things never change: the deep neutral grey and the column split with one dominant portrait. Everything inside CHARACTER you rewrite — that block is the character.

Character reference sheet of a single consistent character, presented on a pure
clean deep neutral grey (#3a3a3c) seamless studio background, clean editorial
layout arranged in three vertical sections, horizontal landscape composition read
left to right, identical character identity, lighting and colour grading across
every panel for perfect consistency:

— COLUMN 1 (largest, leftmost): chest-up portrait, slightly off-frontal, head and
upper chest in frame, sharp focus on the eyes, soft catchlights in both eyes.

— COLUMN 2: full-body front view, standing relaxed neutral A-pose, arms slightly
away from the body, weight evenly distributed, full figure inside the frame with
even margins.

— COLUMN 3 (rightmost): full-body back view, same standing pose mirrored, showing
hair fall, back posture, garment fit and shoe heels.

CHARACTER (must remain identical in all panels): [rewrite this whole block —
age, build, height, face shape, skin with real texture and subtle imperfections,
iris colour with visible detail, hair, wardrobe, expression]

LIGHTING & RENDER: clean soft even studio lighting, large diffused key with gentle
fill, soft natural shadows, true-to-life skin tones, neutral white balance,
polished professional model-sheet aesthetic, 85mm lens look, controlled depth of
field, crisp detail, high dynamic range.

WHAT A SLOP SHEET LOOKS LIKE

Each of these hides several tells, and they compound.

The dirty sheet

  • — A mottled, grimy background plate
  • — A full-body face that disagrees with the portrait

Repeated whole-sheet regeneration. Each pass layered grime into the background, and the model treats that grime as part of the asset. Worse, the two faces give it two identities to average between.

What to do: Mask repairs onto the original sheet and audit again. Never re-render the whole thing.

The game render

  • — Plastic game-model textures
  • — An orange rim light baked into the sheet
  • — A portrait too small

Baked light travels: an orange edge in the sheet becomes an orange edge in every shot. And a face panel far below a quarter of the frame leaves too little facial evidence, so it gets invented differently each time.

What to do: Regenerate from a corrected prompt. This one cannot be masked — the problems are in every pixel.

Mirror-and-soap

  • — A perfectly mirrored face
  • — Waxy, poreless skin
  • — Six near-equal tiles, no dominant portrait

Symmetry reads synthetic and is preserved downstream. Soapy skin is read as identity texture and reproduced as plastic in every scene. With no authoritative portrait, there is no panel the model can treat as the truth about the face.

What to do: Reject. All three compound into the same drifting synthetic character in every shot.

The thread running through all of it: never regenerate what you can patch. Every full-frame re-render degrades the regions you were happy with. It is the same rule the render farm runs on — solve the plate once, then composite onto it.