Create FACIAL EXPRESSIONS for Characters – Midjourney Character Design

do your mid-journey characters keep looking stale bored or as many of the haters say Solas you've been so focused on trying to get the outfit of your character right or trying to place multiple characters in a scene but somehow along the way you completely forgot to give them a personality let's face it life is Bland without emotions So today we're going to inject our character with passion you'll be amazed to see The Unbelievable range that your characters can have and if you stick around until the end of the video you'll find out how I created some of these shockingly artistic images so come along for the ride and take your characters to the next level alright so today's video is going to be a little less technical than the previous one the actual process will still be important however we're going to spend a lot of time going through a wide range of emotions and expressions in fact for the most part the prompts will not be changing very much however it's still important that you pay attention to how I use my words and most of all I think you're going to be quite surprised how nuanced your character's Expressions can get creating our character concept so let's start off by fine-tuning our character concept for a close-up portrait I'm going to create a number of close-up portraits of Carla from various different angles and I'm going to pick a total of eight different images however bear in mind that usually you don't need to use that many images in most cases two or three will be absolutely enough so here's the first prompt imagine frontal close-up on white background beautiful woman bright red braided bun hair only red hair in the style of a Marvel comic book so from this set of four Images I really like the top right and the bottom right images and that's why I'm going to react with the envelope icon in order to get the URLs of each one of these two images now you might be wondering whether you need to upscale these images as well you can absolutely do that if you want to however from my experience it's not necessarily something that you need to do for this particular use case next I'm going to re-roll the very same prompt now from this particular set of images I'm going to use the top right one once again I'll react with my envelope icon in order to get the URL of that specific image next I'm going to make a very slight change to the prompt as you can see I've added the words frontal view I honestly do not know whether it will help but I really want to get Carla in a more frontal position okay so in this case at least I got the top left image which roughly fits what I was looking for a more frontal perspective so that's why I'm going to keep this image I'm also going to keep the bottom right one simply because I kind of like it so so far I've collected five images in total I'm now going to re-roll the prompt so from this set of four I'm once again going to pick the top right one because this is a frontal shot as well now I'm still missing a shot or two from the back of her head technically we don't really need to do this for today's exercise but I do know that a lot of people are having trouble creating headshots of their characters while they're looking away or into another Direction so let me show you how that's done with the following prompt I've only made a very slight change but the critical phrase here is headshot of back of head and as you can see in our images right here it actually works quite well so from this set of four Images I'm going to keep the two top ones and that now gives us a total of eight images so what next blending the character so now let's see what happens if I simply blend together all eight of these image references and create a new image imagine and then I enter the URLs of every single one of these eight reference images that I recovered by reacting with the envelope icon and and then retrieving the URL from the DMS with the mid Journey bot and what we end up with is an extremely detailed and very consistent Carla character so you might be wondering whether this is a genuine alternative to the original process and method that I showed you in part one of this series and yes it absolutely is okay so next you might think that you could simply reuse these image reference and just add a word or two and get a really good image but I'm afraid that's not how this works and I'm going to prove it to you by showing you this prompt imagine and then we add all of our eight image prompts followed by the simple word smiling and as you can see even though these images are actually quite nice they're only very remotely related to our character so why exactly is that well it seems that the entire collection of image prompts that we've added as a whole get about the same weight in the prompt as the text weight so you're effectively blending a random smiling concept with our character reference and that character reference doesn't have enough weight since a mid Journey version 4 we cannot control the weight of the image prompt so it's absolutely crucial that you use these image reference in combination with the original or at least a very similar text prompt so let's add our original prompt and have a look at what we get imagine and then we start off with our eight image references followed by portrait on white background beautiful woman bright red braided bun hair only red hair in the style of a comic book and here's our set of four images by the way from here you can actually get different angle shots of your Blended character all you need to do is change your text prompt in order to reflect different angles and positions of your character and then it will produce relevant images that actually show your new character from those positions but that's not what we're here to do so let's actually start going through a list of emotions creating emotional facial expressions so by default whenever you create portrait images your character will tend to have have facial expressions that are very common throughout the photography World particularly during photo shoots some are neutral some are flirty and some are just mysterious so how about we start by giving Carla a very simple smile here's what that prompt would look like imagine then our eight image references followed by a text prompt and as you can see I've replaced beautiful woman with woman with smile on her face and that's literally all you need to do and here's what she looks like amazing what such a small and Tiny difference makes so how about we try to make that smile just a little bit bigger so in this case I've replaced a woman with a smile on her face with extremely happy woman woman with huge smile on her face and as you can see from these images these small nuances actually make a huge difference however it's also important to note that whenever you use exaggerated Concepts such as extreme it's going to have a much bigger impact on the look of your actor as well in this particular case you can see that Carla has much more pronounced cheeks and it's not just because she's smiling it's a little bit more obvious if we try to make Carla laugh in this example I've replaced our expression with woman laughing out loud extreme laughter hilarity amusement and I think these images largely speak for themselves but it's great to see how much control we actually have over our character isn't it so how about we go one step further this time I've used the expression woman laughing with open mouth woman dying from laughter and once again the nuances are clearly visible in this set of four images not all of these expressions are easy to get right though especially when there are different ways you might interpret a certain type of text prompt in this next example I want to make Carla look ecstatic or euphoric I use the Expression very excited woman elated in excitement and ecstatic so even though I'm more or less happy with the results I got here not all of these images may have been what you know most of you have expected so let's move on to the next one because there's a lot more to come let's give Carla a flirty look I used the expression woman flirting with camera and extremely flirty woman so in this example you mostly see it in the position of her head particularly our eyes and that very slight smile on her face now all of these have been mostly positive it's time to move to something slightly more serious in this next prompt I want Carla to have a very serious and stern look on her face so I replaced my expression with woman with serious look on face and very Stern woman okay so even though I would have expected something with a bit more seriousness her facial expression does look very controlled and you can see in her eyes that she's seizing something next let's create a pouty version of Carlo yeah we can do that too this time I used woman with pouty look on her face woman with mopey facial expression grouchy woman and sure enough that's exactly what we got I personally think that the words mopey and grouchy did the trick here we're now slowly going to move towards some much stronger emotions let's start off with disgust and repulsion so all I added here was disgusted woman and extreme repulsion now personally I was quite surprised how well this one worked out however if you look at these images I think they're pretty much on point so what about anger and resentment is that something majority can give us as well in this one I replaced the expression with woman full of anger and resentment upset frustration and sure enough that's exactly what the images look like Carla isn't quite yelling or Screaming yet however you can clearly see the resentment in our eyes okay I think you all know what's coming next I've used the very strong expression very angry woman screaming her lungs out pure anger hate or what you could also do is you could add the word rage somewhere in there because as you can see the images that this produces are full of Rage now after all of this deep anger and resentment and rage Carla has started to feel a very deep sadness inside of her the expression that that I use in this prompt is extremely depressed woman deep sadness full of Sorrow sad mood and looking at these four Images I think it's quite evident that this character has been through some really traumatic events she isn't quite crying yet but we can make her do that too simply change the expression to woman crying with open mouth in tears and this time even though it's quite difficult to identify the actual tears in the images it's quite obvious that she's crying the only thing that bothers me about this image is that for some reason my journey has made her eyes turn blank or they're kind of rolled up or something I don't know what it is but it looks a bit creepy okay so we're almost done with a full range of emotions here next up is fear this time I used woman in fear scared woman shiver in fear now if I'm going to be very honest here I'm not really happy with these the only one one of these four that more or less hits the Mark is the bottom left one unfortunately the others don't really give me that Vibe of someone who's in in fear or afraid of something unfortunately I also can't really use the word Horror in this prompt because my journey has a tendency of turning her into a zombie for whatever reason so let's move on to our very last Corey motion shock and amazement so I replaced the expression with surprised woman shock amazement and while I think that the Expressions that we got here are actually pretty good I have no idea why my journey is just insisting on making her cross-eyed I have no idea it's like look at that on the bottom left top right same thing why why why anyway so this mostly covers the full range of emotions that you could reasonably think of of course there will be nuances and slight differences but this is the basic set that everyone's going to use so does that mean that we're now done with this video absolutely not we're far from it I actually think that you're going to particularly like the rest of the video because you'll be surprised how far we can take this just one thing before we move on so far we've mostly been interacting via YouTube and quite a few of you are already members in my tokenized AI Discord Community however I did decide that it might be a good idea for me to start posting more on Twitter as well so if you're on Twitter a lot and you'd like to read more of my thoughts and ideas in real time and make sure you follow my Twitter at Chris heidwin you'll also find the link in the description below anyway that's all I wanted to say let's move on creating more lively portraits alright so now we're going to move on to the more interesting stuff we're now going to take what we just learned and expand on it by using multi-prompts just to be clear the objective here is not to create a picture-perfect representation of our character instead what I want to show you here is that this is not where it ends this is where the fun really starts so let's create some more interesting imported for three of the emotions that I just showed you I'm going to start off with our example of a laughing Carla and we're going to use a very simple multi-prompt to do it as you can see our prompt hasn't fundamentally changed all I've done is I've added a second segment that reads red-haired woman laughing with open mouth in the style of a Marvel comic book and I've also added an aspect ratio of 2 to 3 for a more dramatic effect and I think we can all agree that these four portraits have a really really nice touch to them so let's see what this looks like if we use the same process for anger once again I haven't made many changes I've just used the original prompt and added a second segment that mirrors the core element of the expression and what we get are four images with a much more creative Vibe okay so let's do one more for when Carla is crying what's interesting about this one is that in this example I even forgot to mention her hair color in the second segment and yet these are images of an obviously deeply depressed woman so you might be wondering where am I actually going with all of this well we're going to need these images for the final part of this video the grand finale creating an artistic portrait so for this last part I created another character concept I started off by blending these three portrait shots with my original core concept imagine and then we add three image prompts followed by frontal portrait on white background beautiful woman bright red braided bun hair only red hair in the style of a Marvel comic book I'm trying to get a really clean frontal portrait of Carla and from this set of four that I get I'm going to keep the bottom right one because this is where she's looking straight into the camera next I need a full body shot of Carla as well for this I'm going to use the same prompt that I used in part 3 and part 4 of the series and from this set of four I'm going to use the bottom right one in both cases is I upscaled the images and then I basically just replaced the head on this full body character of Carla with the headshot that we produced earlier so why did I do this well I want to keep as much of her original hairstyle as possible if I just use the body shot as is then all of the images that we generate are going to have a Carla character that has long hair by replacing her head I'm increasing the likelihood of getting hairstyles that have buttons as well okay so let's move on and this time we're going to start with anger so what I've done here is I've added the full body image reference then I've also used a wide angle full body shot in the text prompt but the rest of the prompt is essentially the same multi-prompt that we used earlier so if we check out these images these angles are what is usually referred to as a cowboy shot and these as Standalone images are already quite Dynamic and as you can see we've even managed to inject some of that hairstyle into three of the four Images but the next step is where the real magic comes into play we're now going to create a mashup of one of these four images and one of the creative headshots that we created in the earlier chapter now the only thing we've changed here is that we no longer have a single image reference but instead we've replaced it with two image references and the text prompt is still the same now check out these images I think it's fair to say that these are on an entirely different level so let's try doing this on some of the other examples we'll start off by creating the cowboy shots of our laughing Carla once again the structure of the prompt is the same only the emotional expression in this case is different so from this set of four Images we'll use the top left one this time and for more portraits we'll use this one right here and if we put it all together then our prompt looks like this and here's our final set of images quite an upgrade isn't it now I'm not going to go through the entire process again but I do want to show you what I managed to get when I put these two images together using the exact same process so in this example everything is more or less the same the process is the same The Prompt is the same except that we've done it for Carla's very very depressed and crying expression and if you have a look at them from close up it's pretty shocking isn't it it just goes to show you that creating beautiful artwork in mid journey is not as simple as just entering a basic text prompt it's not even as simple as combining a text prompt with an image prompt and even if you're using Advanced multi-prompts that's not necessarily going to do it all by itself it's a complex process of creating adding and reusing ingredients in order to create a final piece something that could not have been done with a very simple text prompt so this concludes part 5 of my character design Series in part 6 I'll show you how I turn this image of Carlock into this and once it's live you'll find it right here in the corner of the screen if you missed the last episode then go catch up on that content by watching part 4 right here and if you're new to the channel go check out the entire character design playlist right here if you enjoyed this video make sure to leave a comment keep on learning and take care

Channel: Tokenized AI by Christian Heidorn

Views: 39,974

Keywords: midjourney v4, midjourney tutorial, midjourney prompts, midjourney action prompts, midjourney scenes, midjourney consistent character, midjourney consistent style, midjourney character design, midjourney character prompts, midjourney character creation, create character in midjourney, midjourney character art, midjourney comic book, graphic novel midjourney, midjourney emotions, midjourney facial expressions, midjourney smiling face, prompt facial expression, midjourney v5

Id: xN9Ohfnp_4s

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023