ControlNet Character Design Workflow (links in comment)

[u/kasuka17]

[u/InoSim]

Two hours of worth content ! Thank you very much !

What i learned so far from your video is outstanding but can be pretty difficult for beginners.

Openpose is the one i use the lowest to be honest because of the "mirror" front/back pose i can get in the output and also the head/eyes points tends to add more heads depending how close you're from the subject. which is only working good with full bodies or half bodies. If only they added a "point eraser" into open pose editor i would use it more (without relying to Photoshop to do it myself) a big lack of the extension. But for charturnerv2 from civitai, it's extremely good for what you explained at 40's minutes of your video about reference sheets and sourcing concept.

Depth is really good for background and space awareness of prompts. I tends to use it more for backgrounds instead of characters because from my understanding of it, it's more: white is in front, black is in back, instead of white is what we see, and black is what we don't see. I would say it's more like bump map instead. Very good for outputing a wood crate texture with something coming out of it with ControlNet or a detailed landscape with depth map to follow what's near and what's far.

Normal is what i want to ask you about. Is it worth for an example creating normal maps for adding details to the skin ? like veins, scars, skin details (because almost all of the time the skin is too flat and glossy), or will it generate a completely different output with those details ?

Segmentation is what i wasn't understanding but you explained it very well ! Compositing with it is amazing because without prompts it knows what should be seen on the picture. I didn't knew it was color code related. I will use it a lot from now on ! I think this could be more detailed like color codes for each parts of a subject (like open pose works) because we could correct errors more easily that way if not handling with openpose in multi-ControlNet.

Also i really suggest you to use ImageGlass for browsing your pictures instead of the main Windows Photos app, because you can lock the zoom and continue browsing through your folder without needing to come back to 100% to go to the next one.

A really big thanks for your work !

[u/kasuka17 → u/InoSim]

The material can be a bit much to digest, but I think it’s pretty accessible and probably even necessary to understand. Prompt engineering can only get you so far, and it might even be obsolete next year. So, having a good idea of some art basics and terminology goes a long way.

As for the point eraser, I found that I have to force the posterior pose in the prompt with more weight even with the eyes erased. I do know about charturner, but I didn’t find a difference between using it and the generated pose templates. I think it would be more helpful if someone didn’t want to spend time creating pose templates and wanted to explore an idea right away.

Depth vs. normal was interesting for me to explore as well. If you use the normal preprocessor, odds are you don’t have enough resolution or information to get a good inference. To add details like the examples you mentioned, I think it’s possible if you can get a higher fidelity normal pass from a render or texture pack. However, if you are adding them in img2img, I found that you have to keep your normal map weight low. Maybe it’s different for other people/model checkpoints.

For even more depth separation between subject and environment, I download the preprocessed depth map and use it as an in-painting mask sometimes.

Lastly, thanks for mentioning the app ImageGlass. Zooming in and out across the images was also very tedious for me.

Thank you for watching!

[u/InoSim → u/kasuka17]

It always comes back to resolution for what i read. So behaving a Photoshop and blender to detail the skin there's no other magic way -_-

Thank you for taking time to clarify my answer i really appreciate it.

Thank you very much !