BUILD WORLDS in Midjourney with Quasi-Consistent Environments

I've talked about consistent characters before but we've never really touched upon how to create consistent environments and let me be clear with the current state of the tech it's not really possible to create an entirely consistent environment within my journey that would actually require a three-dimensional model of a particular space which you could then observe from different angles and who knows maybe that's something that we'll be doing in the future one day however for the time being we're going to have to settle with something that's at least close enough so let's dive into this quick overview on how to create quasi-consistent environments Within mid-journey so let's quickly talk about why you would want to do something like this in the first place if you're working on any type of story whether it be a comic book a children's book or maybe just a storyboard for a new film then most of your scenes will revolve around specific location now obviously not every shot will take place in the same spot but I think that you know what I mean we've all seen enough movies and TV shows to understand that location does matter now of course all of this somewhat assumes that you actually have a good idea of the world in which your story is taking place and if you don't then you're actually going to have a tough time creating consistent environments now obviously modernity will be able to help you get some inspiration But ultimately you're going to need some imagination in order to actually visualize the world that your story is taking place in and in fact the more specific you can get the better now for those of you who aren't particularly good at visualizing something in your head it sometimes helps to put things on paper so to make things a little bit easier let me show you how a simple blueprint can guide you through your creation process in this tutorial I'm going to create a series of images that all revolve around the very same location and my location is a medieval castle surrounded by a large moat I created the following simple schematic within an image editor of my choice the teal colored areas represent land the sky blue areas are the moat around the castle which is filled with water you can also see two bridges that connect the shore with the castle and the castle has three main spaces a small courtyard on the left a large Courtyard with a fountain in the center and the Royal chamber on the right the yellow triangles that you see are locations and perspectives for which I want to create individual images now remember this is just a schematic and we won't necessarily be able to recreate this location pixel for Pixel however a blueprint like this can really help you figure out what sort of images you actually need to create for your story the images themselves don't necessarily have to contain any characters yet most of that can be done with in painting or other post-processing methods close-up shots of particular characters also only give you a glimpse of the environment so their consistency actually isn't that relevant in those shots anyway now that I have an idea of what I'm going to create it's time to get started so before I can even begin to worry about structural consistency of my location I first need to nail down a specific style the theme of this world will be dark mysterious and cold and if you're familiar with the TV show Vikings then it's that sort of vibe that I'm aiming for so not the actual Nordic culture theme but the weather the color grading and the atmosphere and I started out with the following prompt imagine film still wide angle shot of medieval castle overcast the first set of images that I got was actually pretty good but I was aiming for something even darker I made a very slight adjustment to The Prompt by adding creepy foggy and cold gray color scheme and this eventually gave me some shots that were absolutely perfect so just to be clear The Following part of the prompt will serve as a stylistic template for most of the other images that I'll create not all of them but most of them now technically you could probably already use many of these images to cover some of the requirements from our blueprint you could also just reroll the very same prompt in order to get a number of different angles you could also use a very strong to generate variations of specific compositions that you like so for example the bottom left image here could easily be used for the following camera angle from my blueprint so once I had my style nailed down I decided to work on the shot that you see in the bottom left corner of the blueprint so the tricky thing about this shot is that it's actually quite specific I could try to get this specific shot with just a text prompt but there's a fair chance that it's going to be very difficult to do so I decided to use an image reference in order to frame my subject the way I want it to look and here's the reference image that I found on the web that I'll be using for that I chose this one because it had just the right angle that I needed and then I simply added my original text prompt imagine and it begins with the image reference and then film still wide angle shot of mediocre castle with mote overcast I limited the image weight to 0.5 because otherwise most of the images would rarely contain a bridge you'll also notice that I left out some of the stylistic details we'll bring those back in a bit so I had to reroll this prompt twice but I eventually got this set of image from these I picked the bottom right one and I upscaled it since I wasn't super happy with the bridge I then used scaffolding Remix by hitting the very subtle button and removing the image reference hey sorry for interrupting you right in the middle of the video but I just wanted to share something with you as many of you know I have an online video course called masters of my journey which teaches you all of the foundational skills that you need in order to get the most out of my journey and I know that some of you are still on the fence trying to figure out whether this is right for you and I get it you look at all of the free stuff that I share right here on my YouTube channel and you ask yourself how much more can there really be well many of the things that I do in these videos including the method that I just used are explained in far more detail in the course I show many different examples and I teach these to a degree that makes sure that you really understand how they work and you can apply them to pretty much any project not just one particular use case so if you want to learn how to control mid-journey and prompt with intent and visit masters of midjourney.com I'll see you on the flip side this gave me this set of four images from which I upscaled the bottom left one and I repeated the process one more time the only difference is that this time I added my other stylistic elements into the prompt and finally this produced The Following set of images from which I decided to go with the bottom right one next I wanted to create the shot for the moat Brit at the lower end of my blueprint you can see that I planned for a camera angle looking straight across the motor bridge to do this I started off with my usual prompt imagine film still symmetrical shot of stone mode Bridge leading toward medieval castle creepy overcast foggy cold gray color scheme as you can see I only made adjustments to the subject and environment it took a couple of attempts but I eventually ended up with these four images and from these I really liked the bottom right one the only thing that bothered me was the fact that the area to the right of the castle was empty and that didn't really make sense in the context of my blueprint I figured I could probably fix this within painting but boy oh boy was I wrong I'm not going to go over all of the different attempts that I made but just have a look at some of these results no matter what I prompted my journey seemed to just refuse to give me what I want the last one was okayish but seriously if anyone from the journey is watching this definitely needs to improve not only does it waste tons of GPU hours it also feels like adobe's gender to fill does a much better job at this so either the model is actively ignoring the prompts or at the very least it's totally unclear how we should be prompting so now that we've covered the outside of our Castle let's move to the courtyard so this is where things get a little bit easier I started off with a simple prompt using my stylistic template imagine film still wide angle shot of Courtyard of medieval castle creepy overcast foggy cold gray color scheme as you can see the only thing that I changed here was the subject and this produced The Following image grid I really like the courtyard and the arches of the arcades in the bottom right images so I used High variation mode to generate four more options from these I decided to go with the top right image and upscaled it since I wasn't too happy with the fountain I tried generating some Alternatives by pressing very strong and changing the prompt a little bit while this did produce some nicer fountains it also changed most of the environment you could probably still use these especially if you wanted to create a shot from the other side but in my particular case I actually wanted to stick with the previous scene so what I did instead is I upscaled the bottom left image and I then took a screenshot of just the fountain I then uploaded the image to Discord so that I can use it as an image reference I then went back to this image of our Courtyard and pressed the very region button since the foundation of the fountain was good I only selected the upper section of the fountain and changed the prompt to this that actually worked surprisingly well and I ended up with these four images of which the top left was the most suitable for my particular needs now unfortunately the next part is a little bit trickier I still need a shot of the courtyard's gallery or at least something that resembles it so let's have a closer look at our blueprint and the specific angle that we need the primary challenge here is to create an image that looks like it's located somewhere within the courtyards Gallery this is incredibly difficult to do and for the most part you'll have to rely on imagery that basically only hints at the courtyard without actually showing it in other words you want to create images that could be in the precise locations that you want them to be without it being particularly obvious but let me show you some examples of what I mean I mostly used the following prompt as well as slight variations of it film still balcony overseeing rectangular Courtyard of medieval castle and that is just the rest of our prompt this particular prompt gave me the following images now I didn't get all of these in the same attempt these are literally just the best ones that I picked from all of my rerolls they aren't perfect but they are good enough as starting points for derivative shots for a specific scene alright so it's time to move on to the final area of our location let's have another quick look at our blueprint the section on the right is what we're going to work on next this started off pretty easily with a simple prompt using our template imagine film still Royal chamber of metoo full Castle my very first attempt already gave me something that was reasonably usable While most of these look a bit too run down I really like the top right one so I upscaled it creating variations of this is now really easy because you can simply hit the very strong button until you find something that really fits your need but I actually want to illustrate something else here previously it would have been really difficult to place a character inside our scene we would have had to do tons of editing in an external application but now within painting things are a lot easier now I've complained a lot about my Journey's new in painting feature but this is actually one of those things where it tends to actually deliver so I hit the very region button selected the location where I wanted to place my queen character and simply changed the prompt and as you can see in these images it actually does a really good job of placing the character into the scene if we take a closer look at the faces then it's pretty clear that there still are some issues but it's nothing that can't be fixed with some face swapping and this is something you can easily do with any of the other scenes that we've created so far but guess what I'm still not done yet let's take this one step further you might remember my video on impossible shots from just a few weeks ago while the very same technique that I showed you there can be used to reframe a scene that you've already created let me explain let's have another look at our Royal Chambers now what I want to do is I want to place my queen on the staircase and I also want the composition to be limited to a very specific area of this scene so what I do is I take a screenshot of that very specific section and I then upload it to Discord I then use this as an image reference in the following prompt imagine and it starts off with my image reference film still close up shot of Queen standing on wide staircase inside Royal chamber of medieval castle this then gave me the following four images of which some were better than others however I really liked the bottom left one I know it's not 100 the same as my reference but it's close enough and simply flipped horizontally I then upskilled that image but I still wasn't done yet you see very often this process will result in images that aren't as crisp as the others but one way to fix this is by hitting the very subtle button and simply removing the image reference and making a slight adjustment to The Prompt what this then does is it will try to superimpose a crisper interpretation of the prompt onto the existing compositional support in other words it keeps most of the composition intact it just adds a little more detail so that the image looks more realistic now obviously it isn't without flaws but the image on the bottom right already looks a bit better and if you wanted to you could repeat this process multiple times over until you get what you want so just to recap let's have a quick look at our blueprint we started off by creating some initial shots that eventually led us to the following image we then proceeded to creating the exterior shot of the castle with its moat and the bridge using an image reference then we created a symmetrical shot of the mode Bridge looking straight at the castle gate we then moved inside the castle and created a nice wide shot of the courtyard including some adjustments to make the fount look better we then tried creating some shots of the gallery on the upper level and ended up with shots like this one and finally we moved inside the Royal Chambers where we not only placed a character but also reframed the existing seat and this is how you can create something that I call quasi-consistent environment you basically create lots of stylistically similar imagery that reflects perspectives within a fictional space that you've imagined and the blueprint is simply meant to help you do this it basically acts as a to-do list now with all of these different images and prompts you can now basically create any shot that you need and remember most of the time they won't even need to be very specific what counts is the atmosphere the general Vibe and in the end mainly your characters so I hope you found these insights useful and I wish you lots of fun creating your own quasi-consistent fictional worlds remember to check the video description for my mid Journey course as well as a whole bunch of other free stuff that's it for today I'll see you next week keep on learning and take care [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Tokenized AI by Christian Heidorn

Views: 8,601

Keywords: midjourney, midjourney v5, midjourney version 5, midjourney tutorial, midjourney prompts, midjourney workflow, midjourney learn, midjourney 5.2, midjourney 5.3, midjourney consistent style, midjourney consistent environment, midjourney consistent location, midjourney environments

Id: ZMaUHJvXEI8

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023