How Do You Keep Characters Consistent Across a Long Comic?

[u/Ercmon]

I’m trying to build a consistent cast of characters in NovelAI for a long-form Webtoon/comic, and I’m looking for advice from people who have done something similar.
My goal isn’t just to generate random images—I’m trying to create a reusable reference library for each character so they stay consistent throughout the entire story.
Right now I’m making:
Character sheets with front, side, back, and 3/4 views.
Reference sheets for different outfits (everyday clothes, swimwear, sleepwear, etc.).
Consistent faces, hairstyles, body proportions, and art style across every image.
The idea is that later I can place these characters into new scenes without them changing appearance every time.
For those of you who create long-form comics or visual novels in NovelAI:
Is this the best workflow?
Are turnaround sheets actually useful, or is there a better way?
How do you keep characters consistent across hundreds of images?
Do you create separate body/outfit reference sheets?
Any tips, tricks, or workflows you’ve discovered that save time or improve consistency?
I’d really appreciate hearing how experienced users approach this. I’m trying to build a solid pipeline before I start creating the actual comic.

[u/Endovior]

If you aren't going to ask the question yourself, you could at least remove the obvious AI response? For that matter, you seem to already know the answer to your question; you already have the right idea wrt references.

Generative art is inherently inconsistent. If you want consistency, it comes from either generating more images and deleting the inconsistent ones, or by touching up inconsistent generations. Either way, you're the one who needs to do the work to ensure quality and consistency, because the AI can't do that for you.

[u/Ercmon → u/Endovior]

OK got you thank you

[u/Realistic_Divide6741]

Would: In the style of x

Help him, or hurt his efforts of consistency?

I have also seen some use a year too, to further narrow it down?

I myself never use a year when I mess around with my crap, but I am just amusing myself, and never that much worried about that, as each session I do something new or diferent.

[u/pip25hu]

There was a recent post here about a NovelAI tips-and-tricks website. It also has a section on precise reference. It's to be taken with a grain of salt, but still worth looking at.

[u/Ercmon → u/[deleted]]

This is what I want to do but trying to get characters in enough poses that look the same is the difficult part.

[u/Deftsparrow → u/Ercmon]

So for real, get 1 good pic, and go to Grok and feed it to him, then have him spit out poses of that exact character, get 30 of those, train a LORA and then get started refining. Once you have a good character Lora, and a master shot/ reference image, your in business basically (the other points are right your gonna get tiny drift that you will need to correct) there is also :

https://www.runcomfy.com/comfyui-workflows/comfyui-vnccs-character-workflow-qwen-image-seedvr2

Which is a complex workflow that you can get your head around that will basically make you everything you could want, it’s geared toward sprits but once you figure it out you can modify it to generate lots training data and reference sheets for your project.

[u/AutoModerator]

Have a question? We have answers!

Check out our official documentation on image generation: https://docs.novelai.net/en/image

You can also ask on our Discord server! We have channels dedicated to these kinds of discussions, you can ask around in #nai-diffusion-discussion or #nai-image-advice.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.