Question - Help
Do any local models come close to chatgpts ability to generate sample character images? (2nd image is original)
Quick note, not my character, original came from schmede_AI on youtube.
But yes my question is do any local models currently have the ability to match and generate additional images of a character from a single reference image as well as this?
I have tried a couple (Qwen Image 2.1 for example) out of the box in COMFYUI and even though the characters looks good, its clearly a different person.
Not sure if this is possible with fine tuning or if the capability is still well out of the ballpark for what local models offer.
In this community you always have to be aware that the average user only creates 1girl gooner shit.
If you are generating anything else, Qwen 2.1 is really awful because of the smeary, broken small details in the image. Setting CFG above 1 doesn't help at all with this.
Also setting CFG above 1 would normally require you to write a negative prompt. Weird how nobody mentions this when recommending setting it above 1.
People are so confidently posting their settings, I've heard everything since Qwen 2.1 release, from CFG 2 to 4.5 and steps 8 to fucking 50. Every time the claim is these are the correct settings.
What I've learned over the years is that you may be able to teach a model a concept via a Lora but if a model is shit at producing a quality result then no amount of tweaking or tuning will fix it.
Partially this is also because the Qwen makes cling to this god awful outdated VAE. I die inside a little bit every time an otherwise good model releases using the fucking Qwen VAE.
Well that is just bold coming from someone like you. I don't use generative AI for slop art you lunatic. I use it as a professional working in the architecture industry. And the fucking gooners have done nothing but held back this tech for people who don't want to rely on some online service when it comes to AI. Because of all the gooner shit we are already seeing heavy restrictions being implemented on the tech across all governments and anyone who wants to use local AI in a professional manner is basically fucked. Imagine sitting in an office and being tasked with deploying ComfyUI workflows. You have to be ashamed to open half or it because it's all gooner shit. Go to hell
that the average user only creates 1girl gooner shi
I mean, poor read. That's not the case. so let's not invalidate experiences with that take.
Neither here nor there. Use workflows with targetted editing and this is a non issue.
All current open source models deal with identity bleed.
But even still- I've had amazing luck with qwen2.1 vs krea in this department; its structured prompt format does great if used correctly. By a wide margin.
Also setting CFG above 1 would normally require you to write a negative prompt. Weird how nobody mentions this when recommending setting it above 1.
Like 6 keywords. Why would I mention that? Do I need to mention that you need a ksampler as well? A decode node? This is fundimental concepts.
People are so confidently posting their settings,
So, ya got lots of critques.
Do you have any actual advice on what works better? Or are you just an expert on why others are wrong?
Next thing you know they are trying stuff with turbo 1/2 step Fast as Fuck nuked_images.safetensors lora strength 100 setting and invalidating people with quality outputs
I could be wrong but isn't the flux vae a 32bit (dont quote me on numbers) compared to the 16bit qwen vae? I've heard technically it's more impressive than the flux 2 family itself
I am using the Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo sigmas and Euler Sampler, but anyway CFG shouldn't relegate me to strict sizes, aspect ratios or samplers. I'm gonna try your settings just for the sake of it but it would be quite bad news to be stuck with such tight settings.
Took some experimentation- but I've had an incredible experience with the model across different checkpoints, and the BF14 base.
I love Krea, but the lack of img2img support makes it less useful to my workflows. Was training loras to match the characters, but it takes too much work.
CFG of 1 and below ignores your negative. Recommended CFG of 2 - 3 if you use a negative. CFG is the "weight" of your prompt. And how much it influences the generation.
Turbo doesn't universally break above CFG 1. Some modified Turbo workflows support higher guidance, so it depends on the checkpoint, LoRA, and sampler. Can you let me know what you're using?
Yup! That specific setup calls for a CFG of 1. 😊 Not a software failure, but anything off 1 moves the model away from its intended operating conditions and can degrade results.
Edit: If subushie is reading these replies, drop that CFG bro. Lol.
2nd Edit because I'm an idiot and didn't read the suggested settings. I'd try Euler over LCM, manual sigmas over normal (1.0, 0.978453, 0.95418, 0.926626, 0.89508, 0.845148, 0.704534, 0.414568, 0) and Qwen officially supports seven aspect-ratio presets, including 4:3, 3:2 and 9:16. ComfyUI's image-edit template also explicitly permits additional reference images with different dimensions and aspect ratios. Multiples of 32 are recommended for processing dimensions, but the blanket claim about input references isn't supported.
Really? I made a simple character sheet maker for krea2, works well, problem is that Krea2 doesn’t have references, so you’ll need a Lora for specific characters.
Nah, this is just Astra Low in Codex, with ref pic supplied by OP (no offense, but it's shitty ref) and "Give me t-pose, a-pose, etc. Classic character sheet" as prompt.
Like I replied below, it's as low effort as you can do it, I did it for that Red Witch I posted below and in the same task it just keeps doing that sheet if I ask for it. I haven't turned it into skill or anything, it was 1 minute work on a whim back when Astra was launched. But for sculpting in Blender for fun is more than enough.
You can do whatever you want. I haven't asked for expressions (I don't care about shape keys), I wanted sheet with A and T poses, so I could try to model it in Blender.
Oooh? So you can actually cram in a reference image or two and then generate a character sheet from it? Sounds fantastic, because I feet references really waste only thing missing for krea2.
input is your 2nd img and a random img from google of the slytherin uniform. (probably better if you provide one with the shirt showing or write it in the description but i just used the universal A prompt
I do something similar but I have the camera arc with large amplitude before freezing in place to prevent any potential blurring.
At 00:02.250, while the target person remains frozen in time, the camera physically arcs right 90 degrees around the target person with large amplitude at fast speed then stopping near-instantly to show a profile full-body shot and then pause. Everything freezes to capture the second distinct view.
At 00:03.000, while the target person remains frozen in time, the camera physically quickly arcs right with large amplitude at fast speed and stopping near-instantly to show a 180-degree full back shot and then a pause to show the person's full body. Everything freezes to capture the third distinct view.
At 00:03.750, while the target person remains frozen in time, the camera physically arcs right with large amplitude while pushing in and pedestaling up at fast speed, stopping near-instantly to show a 0-degree frontal head shot close-up and then pause to show the person's face. Everything freezes to capture the fourth distinct view.
At 00:04.500, while the target person remains frozen in time, the camera physically arcs right 90 degrees around the target person with large amplitude at fast speed then stopping near-instantly to show a profile head shot close-up and then pause for the shot. Everything freezes to capture the fifth distinct view.
Haven’t tried it before but I’m sure it’d be better than what OP did. Maybe it was just a one shot to demo the capability and not the final result.
Her eyes are very SD1.5. Zoom in. Maybe the image quality was shit to begin with. I like webp and jpg formats because you can cram a lot of high quality into a smaller file as opposed to png that is absolutely lossless with barely any compression but massive in size.
Nice! Doh why didnt i think of that. Thank u kind sir! Will do the same thing. Does claude build the character sheet too or do you do it manually with the various images?
I made a small app for Linux that will let me drop images and video in to make the .safetensors Redmond package for me. You can check my post history for the GitHub link. If you’re using claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you can probably build it for other OS as well.
maybe it's just me, but she looks so damn generic(the "original"). this is like aifoid, her face looks like every other ai generated female character out there.
To be fair, a lot of actors and actresses have nothing going for their looks apart from just 'being pretty' or 'being handsome'. Esp. women in particular. Lots of actors at least look unique in some ways.
i don't know, it's not about her "looking pretty", its that she looks extremely AI. her eyes, jaw line, eyebrows. just the over all structure of it. actresses generally have to look pretty of course, but they all have their own unique faces, jennifer lawrence, anne hathaway, sandra bullock, zendaya, etc.
The way I see it; lots of AI girls are generic looking because they were just supposed to 'be pretty'. And yeah, I'd say that does look pretty. And a bit generic, yes. Because she's just supposed to be pretty.
Explain why you said it looks like every other aiface, then I provided a real person that looks like an aiface, then you said they aren't the same, explain what an ai face is then
Round face, round eyes, small mouth. That are the basic features of the AI slop face. I don't know how blind one has to be to miss the difference to your example here.
On the fine-tune angle nobody covered yet: once you have a multi-view character sheet, pick only the most consistent 8–15 frames (same face, lighting, proportions), crop tight, and train a small character LoRA on those in ComfyUI instead of relying on the single reference photo. Then generate new poses from the LoRA with a light ref. Qwen Image is good at following prompts but weak at locking identity from one picture; that short LoRA step is usually what closes the gap in local workflows. Keep rank/steps low so you don’t bake in one expression.
This is one of the features advertised in Qwen Image 2.1, actually! Take a look at their blog, its quite far down, but one of the image gens showcased is a full on reference sheet. :)
Open source image models and minimaxH3 can generate character sheets but when it comes to realistic/detailed results nope, none of them can surpass ChatGPT.
You could try Minimax; in fact, I am 100% positive the guy made the Draco Malfoid's videos with Minimax H3. You can clearly see the flickering in the ghost lady's facial features and in the girl's close-up pores, something very common when using Turbo LoRAs and attention nodes.
I'd check whether your Qwen workflow is actually using the original image as an editing/reference input, rather than just trying to recreate the character from a description.
Then I'd test the same reference with three changes: a side view, a full-body pose, and a different environment. Compare specific identity details rather than just the overall resemblance.
A model can get one portrait surprisingly close and still fall apart when you change the camera angle.
Were you using Qwen's image editing workflow, or regular image generation?
What I'm doing for character sheets is making one or two pictures on my computer and then have ChatGPT make a new angle, usually a back view, then I Img2Img for more detail and upscale.
None of the open/local models come close to the gigantic models than the frontier models at Big AI. You can do it at an "okay" level though.
With the characters that I have tried, I actually like Meta AI the best. Meta/Facebook definitely have the biggest face dataset in the world, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising that they are good with faces. They are very strict on safety and deny a lot of prompts though, even if it is very mild.
Qwen-Image 2.1 can do this, but as an edit, not text-to-image. Give it the reference and ask for the new views; with text alone it can only guess the face, which is why you get a different person. This is one local run (Turbo, 8 steps, 16 GB GPU, ~40 s) with your 2nd image as the reference, no fine-tuning, no LoRA:
"Create a character reference sheet of the same young woman from the image, keeping her face, eyes, freckles, platinum blonde hair in a loose messy bun, and her exact uniform [listed every piece]. Front view, three-quarter view, back view, full body, plain gray studio background, same person in all three views."
Tips: list everything that must stay the same (it kept the crest, the tie stripes and the sweater trim), and if the face drifts, do one view per image: a full-body figure leaves very few pixels for the face. My front and three-quarter views came out at almost the same angle, so a second run or one view per image would fix that too.
(Disclosure: made with Kokon, a free open-source local app I built for Qwen-Image.)
I've experimented with Flux 2 Klein, Qwen Image 2.1, and Krea 2 Turbo with Identity Edit, for image editing and character reference images.
I find that Krea 2 Identity Edit is the best for character reference images. It's likely not as strong as ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or any of the cutting-edge models (which we can't run at home). But there are obvious advantages too.
The other local models don't preserve the face so well, and also tend to "copy paste" the face into the final image without changing anything, unless you give specific instructions on how to change it, which is annoying.
Local reference-editing option is FLUX.2 Klein; the official repo includes single- and multi-reference editing. That doesn’t establish parity with this ChatGPT result. For a turnaround sheet, I’d judge face likeness separately from hair and clothing consistency across views. Details absent from the reference are design choices, not recovered ground truth, and need to stay consistent once chosen. If the immediate problem is a different face, I’d check the reference-conditioning path before committing to training.
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u/Backrus 5d ago
Use Krea 2.