Character Consistency Finally!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's CHARACTER CONSISTENCY! Cue air horns. 

Honestly, I feel like Midjourney snuck this under the door. With the year and a half of waiting I was expecting marching bands and champagne fountains. But there it was an innocuous announcement "Hey @everyone @here we're testing a new "Character Reference" feature today" The number one most wished for feature in Midjourney delivered in an announcement just like any other. You may think I am making a lot of this but it feels like I have been waiting for this feature since day one. Of course, my first task is to test it then my second is to tell absolutely everyone how awesome it is, you're welcome.

Let's start with how it works.

CREF or Character Reference is a feature that helps us to try to achieve character consistency. It is activated with a parameter and an image link for example -   

shocked cat eating popcorn at the movie theatre --cref https://linkgoeshere.com 

You can control the level of influence of your style image by using the —cw parameter it goes from 0 - 100 while default is 100 for example- 

 shocked cat eating popcorn at the movie theatre --cref https://linkgoeshere.com --cw 50

Now let's take this baby for a spin shall we.

Testing With Different Faces 

I created two faces in Midjourney for the purpose of our experimentation.

Prompt- portrait photo of average normcore fine quirky featured young woman with kind eyes and prominent nose, wearing vibrant pink yellow blue and white pastel colored floral print top. --no freckles 

Test Prompt- (photo) (cel animation) of a woman drinking coffee at a cozy cafe —v 6 —cref (URL)

These are not bad. Our lady with strong features gets a bit too much exaggeration. I find it interesting that you can see the strong featured ladies’ blush in each of the images. Dare I say this may be... might be... could be... working?

Outside Influences

Next up I am going to bring in images that were not made in Midjourney and put the —cref feature to the test with a variety of looks and faces.  

Note the graffiti in blue on the wall behind her that has transferred across in the above example.

Note the branches and leaves that have transferred across in the above example. 

All a fairly good result except when we come to our last unconventional beauty with red curly hair. The AI did struggle there. You can also see elements sneaking over from the reference images. Graffiti in the background in our first blonde lady and branches and leaves from our fainting lady at an angle.  

Get Animated

Character Reference is available in Niji 6 (Midjourney's amazing anime model) as well. I am also curious to see if cartoon type illustration will work.  

To use Niji just type in --niji 6 at the end of your prompt or for a more westernized look 

--niji 6 --style raw.

First I created a monster bahahaha 

Prompt - cel animation character concept of beautiful creepy cute miniature feminine monster a soft pink and black fluffy fur coat, with Pearl and Ebony striped horns, a hint of sharp teeth behind. The adorable feminine monster is quirky with kind eyes and happy with an air of innocence, in the style of pop art and comic art in vibrant colors, --ar 3:4 --style raw --niji 6 

Testing prompt - cel animation character concept of cute monster , --niji 6  --cref (URL) 

The result is ok but you can see it loses the markings of the fur and when we take it out of Niji and put it into our default V6 it is a bit of a disaster. 

Next Up On The --CW

Next we look at CW or character weight which controls the level of influence from the Character Reference (—cref) The default number is 100 and it goes down to 0.

We will use our fine featured lady again and test CREF at different numbers. For example-

photo of a woman drinking coffee at a cosy cafe  —v 6 —cref (URL) —cw 100

We will test at 3 strenghts  --cw 0 / --cw 50 / --cw 100

We can see as the —cw decreases we lose our characters outfit but the face stays about the same. 

SREF VS CREF

Next I am going to add Style Reference or SREF with the Character Reference or CREF at 0 --cw of 100 (maximum) versus a --cw of 0 (minimum) in order to see how the style from the SREF carries through.  

The prompt looks something like this - 

(Sketch) (Caricature) of a woman drinking coffee at a cozy cafe  —v 6 —cref (URL) —sref (URL) —cw 0

For me as a first try CREF has delivered. It's still not as easy as they made character consistency look on social media before CREF but who can ever live up to click bait right? This is not a magic wand, click and you get the perfect character, AI voodoo. This is going to take some time and care. You will need to do lots of rerolling and prompt crafting and experimenting, but it is far easier than it was before no matter what TikTok said. As a freelancer I am hoping I can disappoint less people with the new character consistency feature  I can't wait to show this new feature to clients and students alike. I know there are a ton of people that are going to want to use this for story books, so I prepared a little storyboard for you.

It took me longer to write this article than it did to create the above five images. It's rough and not perfect but wow, 2 years ago when I was writing my children's book I would never have thought this was possible. 

I will put together a decent workflow for my next article but for now I need to go experiment (such a hardship *sigh*)

Eat. Sleep. Prompt.