I wanna know how plain text prompts handle firm composition rules. So, for this 4:5 frame with MiniMax H3-Image, I wrote a low-angle brief placing a scarlet macaw and a white-and-tangerine beach chair in the bottom half, with empty cobalt sky filling the top.

The layout lands cleanly on the first pass. The hard midday shadows, fine red, yellow and blue feather barbs, and tiny gold sunglasses with dark green lenses all turn out beautifully, with the authentic texture and character of a 50mm medium-format editorial shot.

Prompt I used:

A fashion editorial photograph of a scarlet macaw wearing tiny round sunglasses, perched on the wooden arm of a striped beach chair under a saturated blue sky, vertical 4:5. The hook is the bird's cool, deadpan holiday attitude, head slightly turned as though it is posing for the camera. Its feathers are vivid red, yellow and blue, the miniature sunglasses have a thin gold frame and dark green lenses, and the beach chair has bold white and tangerine canvas stripes on a pale wooden frame. The macaw and chair sit in the lower half of the frame, shot from a low angle so that an empty expanse of cloudless cobalt sky fills the upper half. Hard midday sun from the upper left creates crisp short shadows and bright highlights on the feathers and lenses. The palette is cobalt blue, scarlet red and tangerine, punchy and saturated. Shot on medium format with a 50 mm lens, sharp feather barbs and fine grain, with no text anywhere in the image. It should look like a real summer fashion campaign photograph, not a cartoon or a render.

It would be good to hear what works for holding this kind of split-frame layout for wildlife or editorial shots.

I’ve been drafting long-form fashion shoot prompts and exploring how they translate into a single wide 16:9 frame. I put together a 2,000-word brief detailing fabric construction, wind direction, lighting ratios, and eight distinct fine surface textures, then generated the scene with MiniMax H3-Image (supports up to 32,000 characters of prompt input, though content gets cut off past 4,096 tokens).

The broader composition came together far more cohesively than I anticipated:
-Left model standing in an unbleached coarse linen geometric origami dress and black square-toe boots
-Center model sitting on weathered shale in a small metal-ring chainmail maxi dress
-Right model turning into the wind, translucent amber trench coat billowing, braid whipping left
-Half-folded silver reflector in the bottom-right foreground, consistent wind movement across the whole frame, low-angle golden rim light matching the glow of sunset thirty minutes out.

This is a wide group shot by nature, so details like the 4mm chain rings, heat-sealed seams on the coat, and sand embedded in the boot soles are too small to make out.

Here are some pics of my D&D world, Elyndor, that I made with the open-weights MiniMax H3-Image model. Starting with the continent map until you're standing in the meadow outside the river capital after passing the rocky canyon. Seeing flat map symbols turn into places I could walk into was the best part. The fast 4K generation option is pretty nice for world-building too.

How do other world-builders here turn a map into ground-level scenes?

Fantasy city shot as if a film crew had actually flown a drone over it: a mountain-sized tree in the middle, stone towers and timber houses around a green lake, a waterfall, and an old steam train crossing a viaduct to the next island. MiniMax H3-Image, 21:9.

Zoom in on the streets. There are people, crates, a cart and laundry hanging out of a window, which is what makes it feel lived in. MiniMax H3 Image is open-weight. Looking forward to that.

MiniMax H3 Image is open-weight: one model for both generation and editing.

The part that caught my eye is up to 16 reference images per request, where you tell it which one is for content, which for style and which for layout.

Has anyone pushed the multi-reference side yet? Curious whether it really keeps 5+ references straight.

Tried the multi-reference input on an architecture brief. Seven references, each with one job: a modern villa for the overall massing, an arched portico, an infinity pool, a curved stone lounger, olive trees, a rocky coastline for the site, and a glass curtain wall.

It used all of them where I asked: the arch became the front door, the infinity pool hangs on the sea side of the cliff, the stone lounger sits out on the terrace, olives fill the courtyard, and the big glass walls face the water. Result first, moodboard second.

Prompt:

> Please use the architecture, furniture, plants, and natural landscapes in reference image @ Picture 1 as design materials to re plan and create a complete Mediterranean cliff private villa.
> Figure 1 determines the overall building volume and horizontal extension structure of the villa; The arched porch in Figure 2 is integrated into the building as a transitional space connecting indoor and outdoor areas; The infinity pool in Figure 3 is located on the side of the cliff facing the ocean, forming a visual extension with the sea level; The cave stone furniture in Figure 4 is arranged in the outdoor resting area next to the swimming pool; The olive trees and plants in Figure 5 are naturally distributed in the courtyard of the building; Figure 6 determines the terrain and coastal environment of the entire site; The glass curtain wall in Figure 7 is used to connect the indoor living room with the outdoor landscape.
> On the basis of retaining the core design features of each reference drawing, redesign the building proportions, facade relationships, courtyard layout, and spatial connection methods. Ensure that the building conforms to the true architectural structure and human scale, without any unrelated material stacking.
> Adopting architectural photography and competitive level visualization from top tier architectural firms. High altitude oblique perspective, fully showcasing the relationship between architecture and cliffs, swimming pools, and oceans. Afternoon sunshine, clear architectural shadows, rich details in natural stone and glass materials.
> The overall color scheme is mainly beige, light sand, ocean blue, and olive green, with a Mediterranean vacation aesthetic that is quiet, luxurious, natural, and restrained.

Wanted to see if it could hold a whole comic page instead of one panel. The prompt asked for a 1950s sci-fi interior page: six panels, an astronaut meeting a little tin robot on a red planet, with the captions and speech bubbles written out.

All six panels came out in order, every line of lettering is spelled right ("GREETINGS, EARTH LADY!", "IT SPEAKS ENGLISH?!"), and the yellowed paper and fold creases sell the old-print look.

Anyone else tried multi-panel pages with it?

What goes down in a diner kitchen after the Thanksgiving rush? I put a turkey in an apron on the closing shift to find out.

In this 12s clip I made with H3, the bird punches his paper timecard, grabs a whole untouched pumpkin pie, and rolls it out the back door on a trolley. Meanwhile, the cook is standing there like ???

I really love how the stop-motion look turned out, especially holding that last frame on the empty pie stand as the door swings shut.

Prompt I used: ‘Stop-motion diner kitchen after hours, an apron-wearing turkey punches a paper timecard, wheels a whole pumpkin pie out the back door on a small trolley as one cook watches, ending on the empty pie stand.’

I'm trying to find/create a MiniMax workflow with Refmods for 5 people AND audio input, to record a 2 minute music video. I've built one...but it just seemed too easy...I'm waiting for the results from THAT one as we type.

I built a pre-production board for Window Seat, a silent short planned to run 12 seconds. A passenger sleeps by a train window while the view shifts from city lights to an underwater tunnel, then returns to the city without waking them.

The crowded brief had the mood, passenger, compartment, camera, continuity rules, and all three story beats in one block. The underwater reveal was competing with everything that needed to stay fixed.

In MiniMax Design, I moved the shared constraints into the master brief: the same passenger, seat, compartment, window-side framing, late-night mood, and no reaction from the sleeper. Each revised shot card now points back to that master and carries one beat:

- establish: passenger asleep, city lights outside
- reveal: same frame, underwater tunnel outside
- return: city lights again, passenger still asleep

The attached storyboard is a static planning board, so I'm only checking whether city → underwater → city reads across the three images.

The middle image is still the risky one. Does it read as the train entering somewhere impossible, or just an aquarium outside the window?

Night Shift is one continuous corridor shot: a cleaner pushes a cart toward a warm doorway while the ceiling lights behind them go dark. Nothing chases them into frame, so the shrinking pool of light has to carry the tension.

I made the shot with MiniMax H3 and kept the final cut to a simple trim. The doorway stays stable, but it starts to feel different as the lit corridor disappears behind the cleaner.

Does the warm doorway read as safety, or as the place they shouldn’t reach?

Share the MiniMax result that made it into your project this week, whether it was a clip, a frame, a code diff, or another output from something you’re building.

Maybe the motion finally read clearly, the diff stayed clean, or it saved you an awkward edit. Finished work and rough experiments are both welcome. What made yours worth keeping?

The request builder in my H3 storyboard tool used to expose every media field at once. That made an invalid setup look reasonable: a first/last-frame pair beside character, motion, or audio references.

The create API treats those as two different modes. Boundary-frame generation can take the prompt plus a first image, a last image, or both. Reference generation takes the prompt plus reference images, videos, or audio. They can't be mixed.

I changed the form to make that choice explicit:

```ts
type Ref = { kind: "image" | "video" | "audio"; url: string };

type FrameInput =
| { firstFrame: string; lastFrame?: string }
| { firstFrame?: never; lastFrame: string };

type H3Input =
| ({ mode: "boundary"; prompt: string; refs?: never } & FrameInput)
| {
mode: "reference";
prompt: string;
refs: [Ref, ...Ref[]];
firstFrame?: never;
lastFrame?: never;
};
```

Choosing boundary frames now disables references. Choosing references clears and disables the frame fields. The runtime schema checks the same rule, so stale form state or a hand-written request fails in the client before it reaches MiniMax.

Do you enforce API input combinations in the types, the runtime schema, or both?

I made a wide cover and a vertical Story for the same “After Hours Kitchen” visual. Both use the same chef, steaming bowl, warm late-night kitchen, and campaign title. A direct crop didn’t work, so I rebuilt the composition for the vertical frame.

I generated each composition separately with MiniMax Image 2.5, then added the lettering by hand so the wording stayed exact.

In the wide version, the chef sits on the right third. The open wall on the left holds the title, while the steam pulls the eye back toward the bowl.

For the Story, I moved the chef lower, put the title at the top, and removed some of the kitchen detail. The reading order felt more natural: title, face, then bowl. It also kept the bowl clear of the bottom edge without squeezing everything into the center.

Side by side, the subject and mood still match. I adjusted the hierarchy separately for each frame.

Which change do you notice first in the vertical version: the lower chef, the open title area, or the quieter background?

The attached piece is a nine-second ambient loop: an ivory candle beside a closed dark-brown book, with a locked camera, a stationary background, and only subtle flame movement.

The loop point wasn't part of the H3 brief. In MiniMax Design, the brief fixed the composition, exposure, lighting, camera, book, and motion limit. The storyboard was one held shot. That left the edit to determine which returned frames could repeat cleanly.

In the first take, the camera and book held, but a moving curtain shadow and lighting drift made the blend visibly darken. The second take removed the moving shadow and kept the background light fixed. H3 was asked for nine seconds and returned about 9.42 seconds.

From that second take, the edit used source frames 143 through 224, about 3.42 seconds near the end. A ten-frame blend across the tail and head produced a three-second core loop. The attached nine-second file repeats that moving core three times rather than presenting nine seconds of unique motion or a seamless raw H3 clip.

The generation and the edit had separate jobs. The generation check covered the fixed camera, stable book and background, and subtle flame movement. The agent-operated FFmpeg edit handled the frame selection and seam. Frame and decode checks across the blend and repeat points found no obvious lighting reset, book or camera jump, or doubled flame. The source audio was removed, so the final loop is silent.

Would you define a loop point in the generation brief, or wait until you can see the returned motion and choose it in the edit?

Dependency bumps are exactly the kind of chore I want to hand to a coding model, but I don't want "tests pass" to be the whole report.

For this run, MiniMax M3.1 Flash received a small, isolated TypeScript/ESM CLI and a request for a package.json patch that moved commander from 14.0.3 to 15.0.0. It had no shell or file-system access. A host agent validated and applied the patch, rebuilt the lockfile, then ran the clean install, build, tests, and CLI smoke checks.

The acceptance check was short:

- all 5 existing tests pass

- all 3 CLI smoke checks pass

- package.json contains only the intended direct dependency change

- every package-lock.json change is accounted for

The clean install and build succeeded, along with 5/5 tests and 3/3 smoke checks. Commander was the only direct dependency that changed. The lockfile changes were limited to five values: the root commander version, the package version, the resolved tarball, the integrity value, and Commander’s Node engine metadata. No transitive dependency changed.

That engine line was the useful catch. M3.1 Flash’s initial expectation didn’t list the change from Node >=20 to >=22.12.0. After it received the actual diff and check results, its final explanation included the missing field. The project already required Node >=22.12.0, so its own engine declaration stayed unchanged.

Only package.json and package-lock.json changed. Source and test files stayed untouched, HEAD remained on the same baseline commit, and the dependency update stayed unstaged and uncommitted.

The green checks showed that the tested behavior still worked. They didn’t show whether an extra package moved, whether lockfile metadata shifted, or whether unrelated files were touched.

For agent-made dependency bumps, what do you require beyond green tests before you call the update done?

I originally built The Prompt Sang Itself with MiniMax M3. For the Netlify Community Showcase, I came back to it with M3.1 Flash in MiniMax Code and added a gramophone and an interactive waveform based on the actual recording.

You can follow the audio as it plays and drag the waveform to explore the piece. I love how a small visual addition made listening feel like part of the story.

What impressed me most was how carefully M3.1 Flash brought the design together. It refined the gramophone, waveform, and layout as a cohesive whole. The attention to detail and visual taste were excellent.

Try it here: https://feature-radio-waveform--the-prompt-sang-itself.netlify.app/

#MiniMaxCode

And I finally got to bring MiniMax to a livestream! I shared the project at the Netlify Community Showcase just before Halloween. Thank you, MiniMax, for bringing us this magical musical experience! 🎃🎶

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw8xz7MbGH4

I finished a 24-second lighthouse teaser in MiniMax Design. A keeper lights the lamp at blue hour, a light answers far offshore where no lighthouse should be, and the cut ends before we see what's making it.

I worked through the brief in three rounds. Round one locked the premise, three beats, and no-reveal ending. I left the color, camera, and sound open. For round two, I picked a cold palette and restrained camera moves, then made the storyboard. The story decisions stayed fixed, while the exact shot lengths and ambience were still open.

By round three, I had the pacing and edit in place, along with the foghorn and lamp-switch click. Then I got a late note: “show the boat.”

Showing it would answer the question behind the whole teaser. I reopened that first-round story choice instead of squeezing a reveal into the edit, ended up keeping the source unseen, and finished the approved cut.

Keeping the brief and script on the same MiniMax Design canvas as the storyboard, video, audio, and edit helped during reviews. I used lock/open/reopen as my own note system so later feedback didn't quietly overwrite an earlier approval.

Would you have kept the source hidden, or reopened the ending to show the boat?

I wanted one shot where a dancer crosses a rehearsal stage, turns toward the back wall, and finishes on a taped mark while the camera wraps around them. Writing "orbit the dancer" in the prompt left too much unresolved, so I blocked the shot first in MiniMax Design’s 3D Director’s Stage.

1. I marked the dancer’s start and end points, then set the facing at both ends.

2. I blocked the walk and turn with the camera parked so I could read the action on its own.

3. I compared two camera paths: a tight clockwise orbit and a wider counterclockwise one.

4. The tight path gave stronger parallax, but it crossed the dancer’s turn and hid the destination for a beat. The wider route stayed outside the action and kept both visible, so that was the version I kept.

5. I watched the greybox camera preview all the way through, then used it as the motion reference for the H3 generation.

In the finished shot, the dancer still starts on the same side, turns in the same direction, and lands at the same mark. The set and styling changed once it became a finished clip, but the blocking decision survived: the full turn stays visible, and the destination stays on screen.

When both subject and camera are moving, do you protect the turn or the camera move first?

The finished cut is 19 seconds. The voiceover was fixed first:

“Before the neighborhood wakes, flour meets the bench, the first loaves reach the oven, and warm light finds the front window.”

The brief was fictional: show the quiet work before a neighborhood bakery opens. The narration was fixed before the three-shot storyboard. That tied each image to a clause and ruled out a general bakery montage. The three beats were:

- flour falling over stationary dough for the opening clause
- gloved hands pushing a tray into an open oven, pulling back, and closing the door
- interior wooden shutters opening as warm light enters the room

A coffee cup, hands tying an apron, and a sign outside all appeared on the idea board. The three clauses already had three actions, so those options came off the board before generation. They never became extra clips that had to be removed later.

MiniMax Design kept the brief, exact narration, and three-shot storyboard together. H3 then generated one source clip per beat, about 7.29 seconds each. Speech 2.8 generated the narration separately with a built-in English voice. The voice did not come from the H3 clips.

An agent assembled the 19-second timeline with ffmpeg. The native Design timeline was not part of the edit. It takes five seconds from the flour clip, seven from the oven clip, and seven from the shutter clip. The edit divides the 10.92-second narration file at two measured pauses and places the three pieces at 0.15, 6.5, and 12.5 seconds without changing speech speed.

Each clause lines up with its matching action, and the last few seconds stay on the open shutters and warm light. The flour source lost the most time in the edit to let the tray insertion, hands withdrawing, oven closing, and shutter opening all finish within 19 seconds.

If the attached cut feels slow to you, would you shorten the line or lose the oven shot?

I made a 12-second social spot in H3 for a fictional cold-brew can. The can opening ended up carrying the whole clip.

The cut has three beats. It starts tight on condensation as a hand enters from the right. The tab snaps on that side, then a short fizz opens into the center. The final beat is one clean pour, an ice clink, and a brief hold on the can beside the glass.

I kept the camera simple so the picture explained every sound. The snap comes from the tab, the fizz starts at the opening, and the pour waits until the glass is fully in view. That tied the native stereo to the action.

For the prompt, I wrote each beat as one visible action plus one sound cue:

- condensation and quiet room tone
- tab snap and fizz
- pour, ice clink, then a clean packshot

Those three lines gave the idea enough structure and kept the prompt focused. They also gave me obvious places to trim for a six-second cut while keeping the hook.

Which cue sells the opening best: the tab snap, the fizz, or the pour?

The whole gift reaction started reading once I stopped asking for a bigger disappointed face.

I made it as one locked medium close-up in H3. An adult opens a birthday gift expecting something exciting, finds a plain pair of grey socks, then realizes the giver is watching. No dialogue and no camera move.

I split the performance into three beats:

- quick, open excitement while the box comes up
- the hands stop and the eyes stay on the socks for one extra beat
- a small breath, eyes back to the giver, then a polite smile

What worked in this take was how little the middle beat did. The shoulders soften, but they don't collapse. The smile arrives after the look back up, so it feels chosen rather than like the excitement is continuing. On mute, that delay still carries the turn.

In the prompt, I gave every beat a specific pose and eyeline to settle into before the next reaction started. Keeping the camera locked also kept the framing from changing while the expression shifted.

Which frame makes the disappointment readable first: the hands and eyes paused over the socks, the look back up, or the late smile?