3 Ways to Create Consistent Characters with Midjourney

foreign okay everybody welcome I am Nat silver and today we are going to be talking about the three ways that I use mid-journey to create consistent characters for children's books and so we're just going to hop right into it um first things first is I went ahead and checked my settings I did it twice um I don't know I did it twice but I did it twice and so um for the sake of this video we're going to be using mid Journey 5 at the base quality with medium styling and so I already have my image prompt here and we're going to start with something basic my example is a cute little girl with red hair standing blue dress and yellow sneakers smiling children's book illustration style so we're going to take that um that I already prompted and paste it here I did a couple practice runs I noticed that mid-journey changes quite a bit so you might need to play with the prompts that I'm giving you in this video um for example prior to yesterday I wouldn't have to type standing if I typed sneakers or shoes it would show the character standing with so it could show the shoes but lately um mid-jouries but giving me outputs of the characters kind of squatting like they're not even sitting on anything but they look like they're they should be sitting on something and so um I strongly recommend right now as of this date to put standing if you want them to be standing um so let's try that here and we're going to go ahead and pause while we wait for that to start this particular output um and so I asked for a cute little girl with red hair standing blue dress and yellow sneakers smiling children's book illustration style and I'm using version five um like we talked about up here in the settings so um I like a lot of these but the only one with yellow sneakers is number three and so we're going to upscale number three the three is get the URL so you'll make it larger and then you'll copy the image address image address and so now what we're going to do is come over to our prompting and type imagine prompt we're going to paste that address right here behind that little window there put a comma after it and then we're going to um so we chose our favorite and we hit the upscale button which is what we did we got the link and now we're going to modify the prompt so I'm going to paste that prompt in here oops I gotta go grab it first just the beginning of the prompt not the version five it's already going to do that because it's in version 5. and instead of sanding I'm going to say crying or let's say very sad not smiling check that out and so now we have our reference that we like this little girl and the goal is that we will get a version of her very similar to her crying so we're going to pause while that gets going okay so this is our original girl that we really liked and as you can see right here she's smiling she has a yellow hairband her dress is kind of blue with like a sweatshirt top and she has these really cute yellow sneakers on um and I'm kind of disappointed because um we kind of got a similar style of girl coming along um I think this third one is probably the closest to her and she does look sad but she's not wearing yellow sneakers which is kind of a bummer um but that's probably the one I would pick to continue with this prompt um and so if you wanted to continue down this road you could copy and paste the entire prompt with the message URL or the image URL and then just change the modifier instead of very sad very excited and we'll say smiling after that because smiling be something you would do if you're very excited and let's see what we get here here is our result for being very excited so a lot of cute options there none of the same clothes exactly but they're very similar and back with no yellow shoes I'm wondering if I put a comma instead of an and if I would get yellow shoes so let's try that you know I wish it was more cut and dry with mid-journey but sometimes you just got to play with the words and the grammar and the prompt and just kind of work through it and see um you know so in this case the comma does not matter it still didn't give me yellow sneakers so it's one of those things you know I can get yellow sneakers all day long and then the day I go to record the video I don't get y'all sneakers so whatever so you know uh disregarding the yellow sneakers we can keep on going with the prompt and you can get different expressions very angry let's try that I'm not too discouraged when it comes to like the colors of shoes um for myself I can change those in procreate pretty quickly or photoshop um but for other people if you can't change the color of the shoes I I personally don't think that's a really big deal because in regular life kids change their shoes they you know a kid that's going to have a book read to them is probably going to have different shoes different clothes granted not everyone in the world has that but it's very common to have more than one pair of shoes so I don't think that's a really big deal as far as establishing a character and other also in other ways the shoes can be like off the page or they could be you know in the grass and you can't really see them so don't let that hold you back from creating characters because you can create a great story even without a character and how much more you know is it going to add to it to have a the same little red-headed girl throughout the book even if she's not wearing the exact same clothing so um me I'm a perfectionist and I tend to overthink everything and so that really bogged me down for the first bit here when I was working with mid-journey um and you know AI isn't perfect just like we aren't perfect and you know if I was drawing these characters it would take me a lot longer to do and I probably wouldn't be able to create as many books um and so I need to let go and encourage you to let go of that perfectionism as a mindset where you gotta have the exact same clothing on in every single scene it's just not it's just not needed uh okay so this one we doesn't look very angry um but she is wearing yellow shoes in that one um but yeah she's not angry at all oh smiling is still there my bad so we're gonna pause that and try again when you do modify the prompt you want to make sure that you don't have anything left over like I just did with smiling so very angry and we're gonna say grumpy here that way we're not contradicting ourselves so I may or may not leave that I may or may not leave that Boo-boo in um I'm kind of debating on that but I think I'm going to leave it in because you know if you forget to edit something in the prompt then that might give you an error in your output as well okay so I did on this prompt I pasted it and I said very angry but then I left the word smiling over here and so I just redid it and instead of smiling I said grumpy so as you can see we got a a good little angry girl now uh she's not happy at all at all so I think this face probably in the first one is the best um so yeah you can just walk through that process and keep copying and pasting um it's probably one of the easiest ways to get characters doing different things um running we don't need to say an expression there so just take that off running fast okay let's see what happens okay so we have our little girl now and here she's kind of dancing funny um this one kind of looks like she's running the second one up here and Beyond honestly honestly the other two look like she's walking um but I probably would be able to use that one okay so now we're going to jump into another way that I like to create characters and that is through using chat gbt I actually use an extension and the extension is called a iprm for chat gbt and what that does is it gives me templates to use and one of the favorite templates that I use in creating kids book characters is the mid Journey prompt generator right here so I'm going to go ahead and walk through that process with y'all I'm going to click on the mid Journey prompt generator and down here you'll see it says mid-journey prop generator by Kenny and uh basically we want to kind of give an overview um we want a children's book character prompt for a book about science and so this prompt generator will give me four prompts and um we'll see what they're like right here okay now so we're not going to actually take the whole prompt over to Mid Journey um but I just like to skim through them and kind of get an idea on what the character would be for this story so the cool thing about using chai GPT in this aspect is not only does it give you an idea for a character it gives you an idea for a storyline and so um you can ask for a character and then you can ask for a corresponding storyline that goes with that character and so I really like this wacky Whimsical scene with a mad scientist and so I was thinking of maybe prompting my journey for a a little mad scientist character so I think Well what we'll do is um a mad scientist child character or a book so this is kind of where we're getting into the gold of it all um a curious and mischievous child inventor wearing a white lab coat round glasses surrounded by gears wires and other mechanical part parts um I like this one I wouldn't have them holding anything right out the gate I would Implement that later in a modifier and a modifier is basically you know the basic prompt to kind of outline the character and then after you have that sorry I didn't mean to bump the desk here after you have that then you would modify what it's holding or the Expressions that it's using and you would you know generate similar outputs with different expressions or holding different items um so um you know this I've also used these prompts to um create scenes and a lot of a lot of times if you're going to create a book you can use the first prompt output as your book cover so we can try two different things here um I like the zany child inventor character wearing a lab coat covered in patches and stains I think that's really cute so I'm gonna try that one first so we're going to copy that go back over to Discord and then put it back over Discord and we're going to click imagine we're going to paste that as any child inventor character wearing a lab coat covered in patches and stains um illustration for cute okay so let's see what my journey gives us there probably one of my favorite parts of all of this is itching the concept form and so I just unpause the progress here because I it never gets old for me it feels like Christmas every time it happens like getting a present um oh man these are so cute so I love it uh wow super duper cute um well I'm gonna go with number four here uh I just like the little I love them all I just like the little styling of his hair and everything um so we're gonna upscale number four so now another option would be to get the message link so we're going to go with it here and copy the image address what a cutie and then we're gonna paste that from here image prompt paste the image address with a comma go get the rest of the prompt we're not doing the seed number this time um no multiple poses let's say holding a beaker you know like the little science speaker all right looks like I'm getting much better results than I did with the seed method I've had good results with a seed method and you know total crap results so that's not something reliable um this little guy's so cute so here he is holding a beaker or little science jars all of these are great um I love it uh so we want to kind of keep on with the same theme we can actually upscale the first one which I think looks most like the the one we want to use and now instead of having um two one URL at the beginning I'm going to build on to that okay so there's a few poses for our little uh wacky child inventor for that story and now we're going to move on to the last third and final way to create consistent characters and that is using a character sheet and that can be pretty simple you can go back to chat gbt and you can get um your initial idea and then we're going to um get the prompt ready for getting a character sheet so let's go check out our prompts um let's pick a different one let's see here child or character or it's okay all right let's do a curious young girl with a backpack I'm gonna go over to Discord type and imagine super cute black hair multiple hoses and it's spelled correctly okay all right we're getting a curious on girl with a backpack super cute black hair multiple hoses and expressions and so um that's a really quick way um the downside is these little guys are going to be tiny so when you open them up in browser um and save this file then you will have larger files to initially upscale and then what I would recommend is putting them in a program you can use Photo P for free or photoshop or even canva and take out the ones you want to crop them out and then um save them and then upscale each individual drawing so it's a little more work if you do it this way because the characters are going to be a lot smaller but you can also get pretty good consistent characters you know every now and then you're going to have like this up here in the top right where her face isn't really right um but you know you're gonna have that with anything in the AI world uh you're going to have times where you can't use the output or you can use most of the output uh but creating character sheets is fun um I did it I did it recently with my little Chihuahua so let me show you that one yeah and um these are all super duper adorable and um but my favorite is down here the bottom the third one and so um this one reminds me most of my little My Little Chihuahua um so you can do with animals you can do it with people just by typing in multiple poses and expressions and um if you didn't want a background I should have at the end here put isolated white background and then you wouldn't have any color uh but that's easy enough to take out if there's a contrast in canva so those are pretty much the first three ways that I can recommend creating consistent characters in canva um we have the the first method which is uh start basic and then keep modifying the second which is use Chachi BT to create the initial concept of the character for you and then creating a character sheet and so I'm going to have the um a link to this blog post that I'm writing right now underneath this video and that way you can watch it and go through it again and let me know what characters you make thanks so much for watching and hope you have a great day

Channel: Nat Silver

Views: 17,963

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Id: pqUdHp0oyyo

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023