Midjourney: Character Reference - Consistent Characters

Key Takeaways

mid Journey can finally create consistent characters but is it any good hello my friends how are you doing today we are going to check out the character reference function I'm going to show you how it works inside of the chat interface also inside of the web interface and of course the question does it actually work is it really good and what pictures can you use with it let's get started so first let's have you a quick look at the announcement when you're using that inside of the chat interface you're using minus minus C reference and then the URL now it's important to point out here this has to go behind the prompt because it is a prompt command and all prompt commands need to be at the end of The Prompt then you also have minus minus CV that is the weight of the character reference this goes from 100 to zero and 100 is the standard setting if you don't set anything at all now the important thing here to notice is that 100 zero does not define how much of the phase it is taking because it's always taking all of the phase this is defining how much it is taking from the rest like for example the makeup the hair do the clothing things like that of course the pose is not important for that just what is on the person also one thing to take into account here is that this is mainly supposed to be used with mid Journey image generated characters so don't expect that you can just upload the image of a star or of yourself or friends and have images that look exactly like them now let's go to the chat function on Discord and see how it works here of course you're starting out with Slash and then you choose imagine after that you're going to write your prompt at the end of The Prompt write minus minus CF and then put the URL of the image you want to use of course if you want to use an image from from Discord you simply have to click here right click and then copy link to get that image link and then after that you can add any other commands in there like minus minus CV for the weight of the character reference minus minus a r for the ratio and so on so here you can see the character reference image that I'm using this has been created by mid journey and it's an Explorer with red hair standing in the rain for now look at the different elements of the face we have here these gray blue eyes lips that are rather white cheeks that the character has a little bit of freckles also in the face that makes sense with the red hair so here we have the character in a painting style in the vice dress as requested what I notice is that often you get these very twisted hats in a very strange position here we have another painting different style though very nice again the head is Twisted in a not very natural pose but the face still looks pretty similar here we have more of a photographic style what you will notice in most of these photos is that they look similar but for some reason the features of the face are more extreme I feel like the cheekbones are much stronger the freckles on the face are much more expressed for some reason in this case the eyes are smaller on the head looks a little bit strange and then also the lips are very pouchy in that image here here we have another image again a different painting style very beautiful with the pose the head is not in a strange position now here I feel the face looks more natural and everything is a bit more beautiful but that's also probably because there is this abstraction from the painting so one thing with this feature is you have to rerun The Prompt several times to get an actual naturally looking face now let's go over to the alpha web interface here you can see the original women that I created portrait of a female Explorer with red hair standing in a jungle that is the image I showed you before now for the web interface using these images as a reference is actually much easier on the right side you have all these buttons here and in the lower part you will see here it says use image style or prompt you can also have a style reference by the way so when you click your image it is putting it up here in the prompt area when you Mouse over the image you get three choices here the first one when you hold the mouse a little bit will tell you this is the character reference so click on that so this is highlighted and when you move the mouse away you will still see the character in here now here you can simply write the prompt you don't have to put anything else the only thing you might want to add here is the minus minus CV for this strength the other parameters actually are here in the settings tab so you can click on that and you can see here I have my ratio I have my stylization the weirdness the variety the model the version and the speed I want to use so all of that is set up here and then added automatically to your prompt afterwards so you only need to write in here what you want the interesting thing here is if you want to change the character completely from the clothing and the environment you don't actually have to to describe the person over and over again you just have to write let's say woman as a pirate standing on a ship so here you can see with a CV of zero I can change the complete setting of the clothing of the background of the day of time of the lightning and still it looks pretty good you can basically recognize that person in a different setting and as we've seen before you can even change completely the art style and completely the setting and still it kind of has a similar likeness of that person another thing you can also do is completely change the art style even make it black and white like here with this kind of coloring book style and even though it's changed so much from the style it still has a likeness that is I have to say pretty impressive another thing I also tried is to have different face expressions here we have for example smiling works pretty okay for the smiling not so much for the likeness of the face here we have screaming which is a little bit difficult to do without the sound of course it could be screaming it could be something else but again not too bad actually and finally here we have an example of laughing I have actually different examples of that and it works pretty good especially because teeth are pretty difficult now these teeth are you can bite through a tree with these teeth they a little bit big but it's not too bad to be honest now I also did try it with a photo of myself and the result is a crime to be honest like that is not me I mean it looks good for a person it's nice has have nothing against the image of that person but it just looks nothing like me that is crazy I also tried it on this Fantasy character that I have created today little baby dragon here on the way to school and pretty cool or original image and here are the resulting images that are based on this image it is again a blue dragon that is a baby dragon has some clothing on even the backpack so this is the best one but still it is pretty different from the original image now when you have the other versions here they go pretty far away from that especially when you look at the features of the ear of the features of the tail that it has there are quite some differences to that you can see it has some similarities but not too many similarities so I would actually feel that you could have a better result with these fantasy characters if you would use stable diffusion and IPA with a strong value to get a similar looking dragon in a different pose although with IPA it would be more difficult to have completely different poses and completely different situations so overall even though there is a lot of space for improvement I would say for this as a newly introduced feature is a huge win for Mid journey and really gives you the ability for consistent characters let me know in the comments what you think thanks for watching my video and see you soon bye oh you're still here so uh This is the End screen there's other stuff you can watch like this or that really cool and yeah I hope I see you soon uh leave a like if you haven't yet and well um yeah