312 generations. 168 rejects. One line in the log explains almost all of them: the nose.
A Redditor running a daily illustrated series since April logged every image with a one line verdict, kept or rejected, and why. Most reference sheets describe a costume: hair color, build, outfit, general vibe. This one measures a face instead, and the difference shows up in the numbers. 144 images got published. 168 got thrown out because the face stopped looking like her.
The character isn’t real. She’s an AI generated face with no photographed person behind her, so this is purely about keeping an invented face stable across a series, which turns out to be a narrower and much harder problem than it sounds.
Quick Start: What Actually Breaks A Face
- 👃 Nose length and eye spacing cause 84 of the 168 rejects, exactly half
- ✂️ A 120-word sheet beat a 340-word sheet, 13 keepers to 8
- 🖼️ An anchor reference image beat text-only prompts, 14 keepers to 6, the single biggest effect measured
- 🎂 Age has to be pinned with a number and a reason, or every sheet drifts younger by image forty
The Key Idea: You’re Writing A Costume, Not A Face
The original poster’s first sheet described hair, length, build, clothing, expression, and vibe at some length. None of those four things showed up as top failure modes. Viewers don’t clock “is this the same outfit.” They clock “is this the same nose.” Once a face reads as somebody else, it reads as somebody else everywhere else too, which is why the author stopped listing every problem with a rejected image and started naming just the first one that was wrong. That single change turned a pile of complaints into an actual distribution: 46 nose or philtrum, 38 eyes, 27 jaw and chin, 22 hairline, 17 apparent age, 11 ears, 7 everything else.
Old Sheet vs New Sheet
The old sheet ran 340 words and read like a character bio: personality, job, clothes, mood. It produced 8 keepers out of 20 test generations.
The new sheet runs about 120 words. It drops the personality entirely and keeps only what a viewer actually uses to recognize a face: an anchor image, an exact age with a reason attached, nose length and eye spacing as ratios, jaw width as a ratio, and the hairline described by shape rather than hairstyle name. It produced 13 out of 20, and that’s before the anchor image gets added on top.
The Five Tests That Actually Mattered
The author ran five paired tests, 20 generations per arm, 40 per test, 200 generations total, to check which of these ideas actually held up:
- Sheet length: 340 words scored 8 out of 20. 120 words scored 13 out of 20. Cutting won.
- Anchor image: text only scored 6 out of 20. Text plus a fixed reference image scored 14 out of 20, the largest effect in the entire log.
- Measured ratios vs adjectives: ratios like “eye spacing relative to eye width” scored 13 out of 20 against 9 out of 20 for phrases like “almond eyes.” Close enough to call noise, even though it’s the technique the author personally prefers.
- Locked lighting and framing language: 11 out of 20 vs 12 out of 20, after months of carrying two sentences about soft lighting and a waist up frame in every prompt.
- Name and backstory repetition: 10 out of 20 vs 10 out of 20. Exactly nothing, which the author calls the result they’d have bet against hardest.
Two out of five survived. More than half of what the author believed at the start of the year didn’t hold up the moment a control arm got involved.
Build The Sheet In Six Pieces
- Attach an anchor image. This one change alone came closest to doubling keepers, more than every other change combined.
- State an exact age with a reason attached, or the face drifts younger every time, and it gets worse the longer the run goes.
- Write nose length as a ratio, not an adjective.
- Write eye spacing as a ratio too. Nose and eyes together account for half of all rejects.
- Describe jaw width as a ratio and the hairline by shape, not by hairstyle name.
- Add one deliberate asymmetry. A face with a small flaw stays recognizable in a way a symmetrical one doesn’t.
Cut everything else: stacked adjectives, negative lists of what she must not look like, camera and lens jargon, weighting syntax borrowed from other tools, and restating the sheet twice in one prompt. None of it moved the score, no matter how convincing it felt while writing it.
Two Places This Still Breaks
The method has real limits worth knowing before you rely on it. Motion is one: the few times the author animated this character, the face slid around between frames, so everything here applies to still images only.
Multi-character scenes are the bigger one. Twenty attempts at putting two recurring characters in one frame produced three usable results. The second character kept borrowing the first one’s nose and jaw until they looked like siblings by the third generation. No sheet length, ratio, or anchor image fixed that. The workaround is generating each character separately and compositing the frame afterward, a different job entirely.
The full breakdown, including the exact ratio phrasing the author settled on and the reactions from other people running the same problem, is worth a read in the original thread.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What should actually go in a character reference sheet, and what can I skip?
Prioritize facial structure: nose length, eye spacing, jaw width, and hairline. These four account for roughly 80% of consistency failures. Skip extensive details about hair color, build, clothing, and personality vibe, they don’t prevent face drifts. One commenter spent months tweaking outfits only to find the nose was the real culprit every time.
Q: Why does my character’s age keep drifting?
Skin smoothing and facial proportions shift subtly across generations, making your character look older or younger. One user’s character went from tired 30-something to barely-legal-looking by image 50. Specify age markers (skin texture, line patterns, proportions) in your prompts rather than relying on words like “weathered” or “tired.”
Q: How much detail should I actually include in my reference sheet?
More detail doesn’t always equal better consistency. Hyperspecific measurements of facial structure matter far more than exhaustive descriptions of everything else. If your character is drifting, you’re probably over-describing clothes and under-describing the middle of the face.
what a character reference sheet actually needs, from 312 logged generations and 168 rejects
by u/SchemeDazzling3545 in PromptEngineering