How to Create Consistent and Realistic Characters in Midjourney
Explore techniques for creating consistent characters in Midjourney v5.2, focusing on image prompting, image weight, and seed numbers to master character consistency.
Midjourney is a powerful artificial intelligence tool that is the best at generating diverse visual images, but when it comes to consistency, it's not so good anymore. This is a problem for comics, graphic novels, or game creators, for example, who need the same character appearance in different scenes.
While Midjourney naturally produces random and varied images, we'll focus on practical techniques and tips to increase the likelihood of generating similar-looking characters in different poses and expressions.
Achieving this goal requires a bit of practice and an understanding of the features and parameters of Midjourney version 5.2, as the model was not originally designed to generate repeating characters or images.
What parameters you need to create consistent characters in Midjourney?
We need to focus on main three things and that is:
image prompting
the image weight parameter
specifying a seed number.
Image prompting
This is one of the most important parts because here we specify which image will be used to generate the final image.
We have generated this image below and by right clicking we copy a link into MJ.
beautiful young blond smiling girl with blue eyes, in black dress, black background --ar 16:10 --stylize 500 --v 5.2
so our prompt will look like this:
https://s.mj.run/7ZszWP2WvHw drinking a wine --ar 16:10 --style raw --stylize 500 --v 5.2The image weight parameter
This parameter -iw tells Midjourney how much weight to give to the reference image. The parameter has a range of 0-2, where 2 means the most weight (most similar to the reference image) and 0 means the opposite. Here you just have to try which value suits you best, sometimes parameter 2 works great but sometimes you need to take it down a bit, we usually use 1.5 - 1.75 but it depends on the character and what the result is supposed to be.
Let's update our prompt with --iw parameter to 1.5
https://s.mj.run/7ZszWP2WvHw drinking a wine --ar 16:10 --style raw --stylize 500 --v 5.2 --iw 1.5Specifying a seed number
A seed number in Midjourney functions as a unique identifier that controls the randomization process in image generation. When you use a specific seed number for a prompt, it directs the Midjourney to follow a particular pattern, leading to similar styles or features in the output images.
To improve your results and avoid common mistakes when creating consistent characters in Midjourney, consider these tips:
Use clear, specific text prompts describing your character's appearance, personality, and actions in detail. For example instead of "a walking man", use "a strong man walking with a backpack, through forest with a lamp"
Utilize high-quality, relevant images as references that match your character’s style and genre. If you generating from MJ at least use Upscale (2x)
Employ the same seed number for each image generation to reduce randomness and variation.
Maintain a consistent background and context in your scenes, aligning them with your story's theme, such as using a fantasy background for a fantasy story.
Our final prompt:
https://s.mj.run/7ZszWP2WvHw drinking a wine --ar 16:10 --style raw --stylize 500 --v 5.2 --iw 1.5 --seed 2678070869
and different example:
Conclusion
Creating consistent images in Midjourney is indeed not an easy task, especially when the system was not designed for this use case, but it is not completely impossible. In our examples you can see that it can be done and the characters are 90% similar. If you follow our process and the tips and tricks I discussed in the article you can achieve much better results. Anyway, let's see what version 6 will bring, which should be out in early 2024.
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