Character Consistency in Midjourney AI - The Character Sheet Method

creating consistent characters in AI can be tricky but it's extremely useful from creating a character to use for your print on demand business to use across multiple products and for storytelling from Comics to children's books where you need the same character throughout the whole story and as you can see on screen this is a character that I will make in this video stay tuned to see the short video I made using the method we will be covering in this video but first I want to show you how to do it just a quick note here I will mainly be using the version 5.2 mid Journey model in this video there may be newer versions out as you are watching this so feel free to use them but if you would like to get the same results I'm getting in this video I would advise you to use the 5.2 model the same rules should mostly apply to all models okay back to the video okay so we're going to start start off with creating our character now I got chat GPT to write me a short story about a young boy named Jack who yes I named after myself and he goes on a journey to find the perfect present for his grandfather so I wrote In The Prompt little boy character multiple poses and expressions front view Pixar styled character simple cute full color red t-shirt blue pants short curly brown hair with an aspect ratio of 16 by9 now these are the important parts of the prompt you want to make sure that you have part of the prompt as multiple poses and expressions and you can also write in character sheets as well so it just makes mid Journey create an image of that character multiple different times with different poses and expressions so you can say multiple angles as well and it will give you different angles of your character like here and you want to give it your style so I chose Pixar styled character for this one which which gives it a kind of 3D rendered look to it and not a 2d flat look and it's good to add a few descriptions about the character so I've got red t-shirt blue pants short curly brown hair you don't want to add too many descriptions of the character in mid Journey otherwise it will get too confused and the results just won't come out as you hoped and always try to roll your results if you're not happy with them okay so I like this one and what you can do if some of your results come out clipped so if the heads cut off a little bit or the feet then what you can do is just do the zoom tool so zoom out 1.5 or two times and it should fill in those bits that were cropped before okay so I've zoomed out slightly and it's giv me these options they all look quite the same and just choose the one that you're happy with now another important note is which I didn't add in this prompt on purpose but is to add white background into the prompt as that will give you a nice white backdrop for your character to easily cut them out but in this one you can see it's got a blue backdrop but don't worry too much as there is a website which automatically cuts that out so I thought I'd just show you that just in case you created a character that you did like but it had a color backdrop on it okay so just save that to your computer and you can go to this free website here which allows you to crop your image into multiple images which we will do with our character so just select around each character and crop them and then save them as their own image and then what we're going to do is remove the background from the character and we're going to use background cut.com which is free to use and Incredibly easy and it does a really good job so as you can see here we've added in the image of our character which you can see has a blue background and it cuts it out perfectly and then you just download that and continue the same with the rest of your images all right so now we're back in mid journey and just go down to the bottom left and click the plus icon and upload a file and then select all the images you just saved with the background removed and press enter and there you go the images are uploaded into mid Journey now what we're going to do is Click on each individual image that we just uploaded and we're going to save the UR L and you can open it in browser and then right click and copy image address now you can either store these links in another document if you want just to keep a list of them cuz what we're going to do is copy each one and then paste it into our next prompt so just go through and copy each URL just make sure there's a gap in between each one in mid journey and the more images you can use the better really because it just gives mid Journey more information to use so I've got eight here and then what you want to do after you've pasted in all the links go back to the original prompt of the character that you created copy that and paste it in after those links so I'll just copy this and paste it in after so in the prompt where it said multiple poses and expressions we want to add in the pose that you're looking to achieve so in this one I'm going to add running pose and see what it makes so we giving mid Journey all of the information about this character so we can see through all those URLs what this character looks like and then by giving it another prompt with a different pose it should hopefully create a character that looks similar but with the pose that you're wanting to use in your story all right and here's the first batch of images that mid Journey created and they don't look too bad the character still looks very similar just a little bit different than our original but but if I saw that in a book I probably wouldn't even notice but there is a problem where the character is clipped off so you just have to use that zoom out feature to then fill in those gaps or in the prompt just make sure you don't have the 16x9 aspect ratio as that makes it longer and it might clip off those top bits so maybe just use either I'd say maybe 4x5 aspect ratio would be good so as you can see those images had colored backgrounds so I'm just going to try another prompt but with white background but like we did before you can use that background cut website to cut the character out of the scene I think it was creating a colored background because we had the word full color in the prompt now let's try delete that and see what it does and we'll also add in white background all right these images actually came out a bit better they've actually got a white background except for one for some reason again you'll just have to use the zoom out feature to make sure you've got the full character in shot so I'm going to upscale this image and use the zoom out 1.5 times feature and see if that fills in the character it did a really good job actually the top of the hair and the feet will be different obvious see these two here have the hair still clipped out but you can just zoom out even more and it will fill those in your character may not have any clipping problems but if you do this is just a really good method to save those characters cool so I like this image and I'm just going to zoom out a little bit more just so we can see if the hair gets filled in and great yeah it did a really good job okay so let's try a different pose or expression this time so for this image I'm going to change it to a scared expression and see what mid Journey creates the only problem is we do have the clipto problem but that's just because I've chosen the 16x9 aspect ratio so just make sure to address that when you create your characters yeah it does look like our character he's got a really good scared expression okay on this one I've just zoomed out to hopefully eliminate the clipping problem I'm going to change the aspect ratio to 4x5 which should give it more height than width which should hopefully not clip the character okay and these came out much better so as you can see just messing around with the settings you can get some really good results and here's another running pose and in this one I actually put side profile as well into the prompt so it shows him running on a slightly different angle than before and then you can start adding the poses that you want to use in your story so I created a few different poses and expressions of our character which you can see here if you'd like to know more about the prompts I've used I've actually made a document containing them all in the description below so please feel free to check that out now you may be thinking it's all well and good having this character in different poses and doing different things but they're all on a white backdrop and have no environment around them well that's why now we're going to move into how to create an environment for your character and to make them feel like they belong in that scene so this is perfect for say if you're creating a children's book and you've got your character poses and expressions already but they've got a white backdrop and you want to add them into the scenes of your story so what you can do is follow the process from before once you've got all your characters ready and cut out the back ground so that they are a PNG with a transparent background so that when you place them inside another image of the environment that they fit in there but without any white background behind them all right so I've already made a bunch of backgrounds for my story so here's an example of one of the environments that I've created for our story as you can see it kind of fits the same style of our character it's bright it's colorful it looks kind of like a Pixar film so this is the scene where our character Jack leaves the house on his little Adventure so what we're going to do now is get one of the images of the poses we created earlier and then place them into this image of the environment to make it look like it's one cohesive image now to do this I'm going to use a free piece of software called photop now this is a web-based software it works pretty much like Photoshop and it's just a really powerful tool it's pretty crazy that it's free to use but please don't be daunted by this as I know it can be a bit scary looking at all these icons everywhere but I'll run you through on my workflow so we're going to come in we'll go to file new project and I'm going to create a document in landscape aspect ratio so just make sure you choose the right size for your project and I'm going to change the DPI to 150 so that's just the amount of pixels per inch so the higher it is the more detail should be in the image all right so I'll just import that image of the background and then I'm going to place our character into it so I'm going to use this pose of little Jack running I'm guessing he's very excited to go on this adventure and just adjust the size of the character cuz you don't want them too big or too small and remember you can always scale the background if you want to now sometimes it might look like the character that you've just placed into the scene doesn't quite fit in it might be too jarring for the background like it might pop out too much and you want to feel like the character is part of that scene so I've got a few tips and tricks on how to make your character feel like it's part of that environment so first of all you want to create a new layer in between the character and the background and then use the ey dropper tool to select the color of the ground underneath the character and you may want to make it a bit darker and then then use the brush and change the opacity to low and make it a soft rounded brush and then just paint under the character so it looks like a shadow on the path and you can also use this burn tool which makes whatever area you go over darker and as you can see I've gone onto the character layer now and you can use the burn tool to just add a bit of Darkness just so it looks like he's coming into contact with the half it's these subtle touches that can make a big difference in making it feel like a cohesive image I think that actually looks pretty good I'm happy with that and if you want to say change the brightness or saturation or contrast on each of the individual layers you can do that so you just go up to image then adjustments and brightness and contrast and as you can see here moving the slider makes this layer brighter less contrasty more contrast Y and you want to just move around the slider just so you feel like it fits in with the image perfectly and you can do the same to the background as well or any layer that you have in your project as you can see it just brings everything together and it feels like this was created just using one prompt for the whole image and not two things that are put together okay let's do another quick example so in this part of the story our character Jack is looking for the White Rose which is quite Elusive and legendary in these parts and he's getting it for his grandfather for his birthday so we created a pose here of Jack reaching out for something as you can see I've placed him in but he's looking the wrong way so what we can do here is flip the character or you can flip the background if you want so you go to edit transform and then flip horizontally and there you go and as you may have noticed our character is missing a finger if you do create an image that you like in mid journey and you notice that something is missing like here a finger I'll show you a way how you can fix that image and it's really easy to do so what I'm going to do is grab this tool here which is called the lasso tool and just select one of the fingers that we want to copy just make sure you're on the layer of the character and then go to edit and copy and then edit and paste and then use the arrow tool and move it across and then rotate and place it where you want it to go and there you go we've replaced a finger and what you want to do is just take that finger layer and select the character layer together and merge layers as then they become one layer now you may be thinking well he's standing on the grass but it doesn't look like he's standing on the grass really it's kind of he's kind of just floating there so this is another cool tip so what we're going to do actually is copy part of the background and then paste it to the front of all the layers so that it'ss in front of his shoes so I'm actually going to choose the polygon or lasso tool here to make straight lines and I've got the background selected so what I'm actually doing is just cutting out a very basic grass shape here which I want to cover his shoes with it looks like I'm going over the character but I'm actually copying part of the background now you just have to make sure to complete the loop okay once it's ready just copy and paste and go to that layer and just move it up to the top of the list and there you go you can see it looks like there is some grass there and you can move that around now if you want to get rid of these kind of harsh edges to the grass I like to use the blur tool just go in and just blur it it slightly just kind of Blends it in a bit more I know this seems like it's extra work but believe me it does really make the image that much better now you can try prompting in mid journey to try get the Perfect Image but I find if you get two perfect images say one of the character one of the background it's just a bit easier to take them into photop put them together and then just do a bit of editing and you just get a really good result cool I think that looks really good we look at the before and after the small edits make a big difference and then to save your image just go to file export as and then choose which file type you'd want so I'm going to choose PNG and then just save it and after you've exported your final images you can use a free or paid upscaler to make sure you're getting the best resolution of your image and I'll leave a link below to a really good free upscaler okay so now I'm going to show you the short story that I made it's a very short children's story which I made with chat GPT and an AI voiceover and of course with all the skills that we learned in this video with the character sheet method I hope you enjoy it in the heart of a Green Valley Jack heard Legends of a magical White Rose at top the tallest hill which bloomed only once a year Desiring a unique gift for his grandfather's birthday Jack embarked on the journey with every step gentle breezes whispered encouragement at the peak heed CED the radiant White Rose glowing under the sun's Embrace Jack carefully picked it and descended his heart full of joy handing over the rose the petals shimmered and filled his grandpa with loving [Music] [Music] memories I think that turned out really well it was very short but I think it showed you what can be done using this method it opens up so many possibilities with a character that you've created opening up so many storytelling opportunities if you've leared anything in this video please give us a thumbs up feel free to comment below and make sure to check out our other videos on creating consistent characters just click the thumbnail on the screen to check it out you won't want to miss it

Channel: Atomic Gains

Views: 14,305

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Id: 4nxmKPR2cv4

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024