The document you build before you generate anything

What it is, and what it is not

A character sheet is a small set of images of your character, made once, that every shot in the project is built from. Animation studios have used them for a century. They exist because a description is not a specification, and a drawing is.

It is not a mood board and not a set of nice pictures. It is a reference document with a job: any first frame you need later should be constructible from it, by generation with reference, by compositing, or by hand.

The minimum sheet

Six images. Fewer and you will be describing rather than referencing.

1. Frontal head and shoulders, neutral expression, eyes to camera.
2. Three-quarter, the most useful angle for almost every shot.
3. Profile.
4. Full body, front, in the exact wardrobe, showing footwear.
5. Full body, back. Needed for over-the-shoulder and walking-away shots, which are the ones you will lean on hardest.
6. Medium shot in context: the character in the actual location, at the actual light.

All six at the same light direction, the same quality, the same colour temperature. That is the part people get wrong: six lovely images under six different lights is not a character sheet, it is six characters.

Building it

Make image one properly. Spend the attempts. Repair it by hand. This is the face for the whole project and everything else derives from it.

Then produce the others from it:

• With a reference feature, if your image tool has one: supply image one and ask for the three-quarter.
• By generating a batch and keeping the ones that match, if it does not.
• By hand, in Photopea or GIMP, for the composites: the correct head from one generation on the correct body from another.

The hand route feels like defeat the first time. It is faster than the twelfth generation, and it is deterministic, which no amount of re-rolling is.

What goes in the written half

The sheet is images plus a short text file, because some things are easier to check as words than to read off a picture:

PRIYA
age ~34, medium-brown skin, short black hair tucked behind left ear
small mole above right eyebrow
WARDROBE: olive green cotton kurta, sleeves to elbow,
  dark grey trousers, brown leather sandals, thin silver bangle LEFT wrist
LIGHT: soft key from camera left, ~45 deg, slightly above eye level,
  warm (window), low contrast
PROPS: canvas shoulder bag, mustard, worn on RIGHT shoulder

Note the sides. Left and right are where continuity dies, because a model will mirror things freely and you will not notice until two shots are next to each other.

This file goes into every still prompt for the character, in some compressed form. It is the thing you paste.

Design the character to be reproducible

A point that saves more time than any technique. Some characters are far easier to hold than others, and you usually get to choose.

Easier: distinctive silhouette, strong single hair shape, one saturated wardrobe colour, one memorable accessory, no fine pattern, no small jewellery, no glasses.

Harder: subtle features, elaborate patterned clothing, long loose hair, fine jewellery, glasses, anything with text on it.

Glasses deserve a specific mention: thin frames sit near the autoencoder’s resolution floor and flicker, and the reflections on the lenses drift. If a character can be written without glasses, write them without glasses.

This is not a compromise imposed by the tool. It is costume design, and costume designers have always chosen silhouettes that read at distance and colours that survive the grade.

Checking the sheet before you commit

Put all six images on one canvas, at the same size, and look at them together. Specifically check:

• Is the light coming from the same side in every one?
• Is the wardrobe the same colour, not merely a similar colour?
• Is the accessory on the same wrist, the same shoulder?
• Does the hair part on the same side?

Any mismatch here becomes a mismatch in every shot that derives from that image. Fixing it now is one regeneration; fixing it later is a scene.

The free path

A browser image tool with a daily allowance for the generations, Photopea for the composites and repairs, and a text file. Total cost zero, total time a couple of hours for a character you will use for a whole project.

Today: build the six images for one character, put them on a single canvas side by side, and fix every mismatch before you generate one second of video.