Tutorial: Creating Consistent Characters with NovelAI Diffusion Anime [Female]

While the NovelAI Diffusion Anime image generation model is based upon Stable Diffusion, its experience is unique because it's tailored to recognize all manner of tags to define the content of images. This guide will cover how the use of tags impacts images, what the different types of tags are, and a method for utilizing tags to create an AI generated character who retains a consistent appearance across different images.

Ever dreamed of displaying an original character from one of your NovelAI stories in different situations? Working on a comic or visual novel? Want to design your ultimate dream girlfriend and make pretty images of her?

The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to efficiently define the look of a female AI character with the help of NovelAI's tagging, along with some best practices and tips for general character AI art generations.

What this tutorial covers:

• Subject
• Hair
  • Hair length
  • Hairstyle
  • Hair color
• Eyes
• Skin
• Body
• Framing and camera angle
• Clothing
• Creating a character

Subject

The very first thing you want to do is to choose a subject tag for your character. This is done by starting your prompt with a tag such as 1boy, 1girl, or 1other. Adding the solo tag can help get rid of any extra characters in the background.

When prompting for multiple subjects, use tags such as 2girls, 3girls, 4girls, 5girls, 6+girls, or multiple girls. Similar tags to these for other character types also exist, such as 2boys, 2others, and so on.

Why are these subject tags so important? They're what the NovelAI Diffusion Anime image models were trained with, so using them will lead to the best results.

Hair

Starting from the top, the next thing we want to do is add tags which define our character's hair. Although there are too many tags related to hair to list here, we can classify hair-related tags into three different types: hair length, hairstyle and hair color.

Hair length

When describing our character's hair length, the following tags are exceptionally useful:

• very short hair
• short hair
• medium hair
• long hair
• very long hair
• absurdly long hair
• big hair
• bald (Or alternatively) bald girl

Let's begin! It's time to meet Tutorial-chan, she will be our sample character used to show the effect of tags in our images. Since she's supposed to be a girl we'll start our prompt with 1girl, solo, followed by tags that describe her appearance.

Hairstyle

When choosing a hairstyle for your AI generated character, there are an even wider variety of tags that NAIDiffusion offers you; these are divided by the different parts of the head they influence. Please note, due to the sheer number of hairstyle tags in the dataset, we will only be going over a small selection in this guide.

Some examples of general hairstyle tags are bob cut, braid, french braid, ponytail, twintails, half updo, pompadour, afro, and so on for other popular hairstyles.

You can get even more specific with certain hairstyles; for example, high ponytail, low ponytail, side ponytail, short ponytail, folded ponytail, braided ponytail, and topknot are all valid tags used to specify the different ways hair can be tied up. There are many more similarly unique tags like those above for other hairstyles; looking up hairstyle names and checking for tag suggestions is highly recommended!

There are also tags we can use on the AI to only influence the hair at the front of the head. For example bangs, blunt bangs, hair between eyes, hair over eyes, hair over one eye, parted bangs, swept bangs, sidelocks, and many more.

In contrast, some tags which specifically influence hair at the top of the head include ahoge, huge ahoge, heart ahoge, antenna hair, hair pulled back, and hair slicked back.

Additionally, tags like curly hair, messy hair, spiked hair, straight hair, or wavy hair can be used to change the texture of the hair.

You can even play around by surrounding tags in {} or [] to increase or decrease the impact of a certain tag! For example, a character with {{{messy hair}}} is going to have an unruly and wild head of hair, while one with [[[messy hair]]] will tend towards a more casual look without going overboard. For more information about this, check the Strengthening & Weakening Vectors page.

For male characters, there are also facial hair tags like facial hair, beard, goatee, mustache, stubble, and sideburns.

Hair color

Lastly on the hair tags, are those which influence hair color.

• black hair
• blonde hair (Or alternatively platinum blonde hair)
• blue hair (Or alternatively aqua hair, light blue hair, or dark blue hair)
• brown hair (Or alternatively light brown hair)
• green hair (Or alternatively dark green hair, or light green hair)
• grey hair
• orange hair
• pink hair
• purple hair (Or alternatively light purple hair)
• red hair
• white hair

There are also tags used to achieve more complex color combinations like multicolored hair, colored inner hair, colored tips, gradient hair, rainbow hair, split-color hair, streaked hair, and two-tone hair.

Eyes

With the hair done, let's move on to the eyes. Here we have tags to determine the eye color which can also be combined with some additional tags for rarer types of eyes.

When it comes to choosing our character's eye color, we have the following tags to choose from.

• aqua eyes
• black eyes
• blue eyes
• brown eyes
• green eyes
• grey eyes
• orange eyes
• purple eyes
• pink eyes
• red eyes
• white eyes
• yellow eyes

Adding to these, you can also use heterochromia tag to combine eye colors.

Some additional tags you can use for unique pupil types are horizontal pupils, slit pupils, symbol-shaped pupils, star-shaped pupils, diamond-shaped pupils, flower-shaped pupils, heart-shaped pupils, and mismatched pupils. Other miscellaneous eye tags available are black sclera, bags under eyes, flaming eyes and glowing eyes.

Skin

Tags that influence skin color are pale skin, tan, dark skin, and very dark skin. Other tags like dark-skinned female, dark-skinned male, and dark-skinned other might be of interest when prompting for more than one character.

For other unnatural and fantastical skin colors, use the colored skin tag along with one of the following:

• black skin
• blue skin
• green skin
• grey skin
• orange skin
• pink skin
• purple skin
• red skin
• white skin
• yellow skin

There are also other miscellaneous tags we can use to add detail to the face, like freckles, makeup, lipstick, mole under eye, mole under mouth, thick eyebrows, scar on face, and facepaint.

Body

There are many tags used to influence a character's body, some affect the entire body type in general while others focus on specific body parts.

Not all tags are made equal, some have way stronger effects than others. For example, toned acts like a much more subtle version of muscular. As always, using {} and [] to strengthen or weaken these tags will allow for a more granular control.

Height is affected by tags like tall, tall female, and petite. Another way of influencing height is by changing the canvas size, taller images produce taller characters and vice-versa.

Tags related to thin body types:

• skinny
• Body part specific tags: ribs, slim legs, narrow waist

Tags related to heavy body types (ordered from weakest to strongest):

• curvy
• plump
• fat
• obese
• Body part specific tags: belly, stomach, thick thighs, wide hips

Tags related to athletic body types (ordered from weakest to strongest):

• toned
• muscular (Or alternatively muscular female, or muscular male)
• Body part specific tags: abs, obliques, biceps, pectorals

Other tags like flat chest, small breasts, medium breasts, large breasts, huge breasts, or gigantic breasts can also be used with female characters.

Framing and camera angle

There are various tags that influence the overall image composition rather than the character's appearance.

There are two different types of tags that influence the overall image composition rather than the character's appearance. We can classify them as framing tags and camera angle tags.

Framing tags aren't the only thing that influence what's shown in an image; changing the canvas size will affect the framing as well. Even tags related to body parts or clothing like boots can affect framing since the presence of boots implies the existence of visible feet, so even with a tag like cowboy shot you may see feet appear in your images.

The tag close-up zooms into whatever is in your prompt, so if for example, you have a bunch of torso clothing tags but no face tags you'll get a chest close-up.

Framing tags (in order of increasing view):

• close-up
• portrait (face through shoulders)
• upper body (face through torso)
• lower body (from torso down)
• cowboy shot (face through thighs)
• feet out of frame or foot out of frame (face to below knee)
• full body (whole body)
• wide shot (whole body from far away)
• very wide shot (whole body from very far away)

View Angle tags:

• dutch angle (adds a slight tilt to the camera)
• facing viewer
• from above
• from behind
• from below
• from side
• profile
• sideways
• upside-down

There are also other miscellaneous tags used to get multiple angles of the same character, like multiple views, zoom layer, and reference sheet, the latter of which can be combined with expressions and some emotions tags to get several variations of the same character showing different expressions and emotions.

Clothing

Last but not least, are the clothes worn by our character. Due to the sheer amount of options there are to choose from, we'll go over them in much broader strokes than the previous sections.

Building out an outfit for your character starts with thinking about each section.

Some headwear tags are baseball cap, crown, hair ribbon, helmet, beret, and so on.

Some topwear tags are jacket, dress, dress shirt, tank top, and so on.

Some legwear tags are skirt, pants, pelvic curtain, shorts, and so on.

Creating a character

Now that we've gone over all the different tags there are, it's time to put everything together and build us a character! For this guide, we will be creating a Traveling Sorceress, fitting for a fantasy story and going through the process step-by-step.

Just like at the start of this guide, we'll begin our prompt with the subject tag. In our case, it's 1girl, solo. As for our framing tags, we'll start off with a full view of our character using the full body tag, and then we'll be changing it to fit our needs.

Moving on to our character herself, we'll go from top to bottom and start off with her head. For hairstyle tags, we're going with something simple but proper, just swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair. As for color tags, we're adding platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin right after our hair tags.

Clothing wise, we'll begin with witch hat, robe. And lastly, for body tags, we'll use medium breasts, skinny, slim legs and start generating to get an idea of what we're working with.

Our starting prompt is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, witch hat, robe, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

As seen above, the outfits the AI is generating aren't exactly consistent with each other across different generations. Only having witch hat, robe as our clothing tags is simply too vague, and we're leaving too much up to the AI. If we start describing the outfit in detail by adding more tags, we'll get a much more consistent look.

Let's start with the obvious and give the robe and hat some color. We'll modify our clothing tags to witch hat, blue headwear, blue robe and try again.

Our prompt now is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, witch hat, blue headwear, blue robe, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

It still looks too inconsistent. What we need is to define our character's outfit further, with only witch hat, blue headwear, blue robe as our clothing tags a lot of things are still left up to chance. Let's add tags to give our sorceress some gloves and footwear. Since she is supposed to be some sort of adventurer or traveler, brown gloves, knee boots are a fitting choice.

Our prompt now is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, witch hat, blue headwear, blue robe, brown gloves, knee boots, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

Now let's add tags to define the clothes in our character's torso so that the whole area starts feeling less random. We'll be going with corset, leather belt, leather pouch so our traveling sorceress finally has somewhere to store her supplies!

Our prompt now is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, witch hat, blue headwear, blue robe, corset, leather belt, leather pouch, brown gloves, knee boots, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

Things are really starting to take shape! Let's add some tags to describe the lower half of the outfit now. We'll go with short skirt, blue skirt, frilled skirt, black pantyhose.

Our prompt now is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, blue witch hat, blue robe, corset, leather belt, leather pouch, short skirt, blue skirt, frilled skirt, black pantyhose, brown gloves, knee boots, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

This is near perfect now! Let's do some final modifications to finish off our character! This time we're actually going to replace one of our old tags, as well as adding a few final ones. We're replacing blue robe with blue cape since the AI likes to add a cape on the back at times, so we might as well add it to our prompt. We'll also add the white shirt, long sleeves tags to make sure the top half of our outfit changes color less often.

Our prompt now is:

1girl, solo, full body, swept bangs, bob cut, medium hair, platinum blonde hair, aqua eyes, pale skin, witch hat, blue headwear, blue cape, white shirt, long sleeves, corset, leather belt, leather pouch, short skirt, blue skirt, frilled skirt, black pantyhose, brown gloves, knee boots, medium breasts, skinny, slim legs

Done! We now have a very consistent character! With that done, now we can just modify our prompt to generate images with different poses, camera angles and backgrounds to achieve the best AI image generations displaying the same character.

As you can see, the more tags we use to describe our character's outfit, the more consistent it will stay across different images. Of course, simply adding more tags with our NovelAI image generator will not always be the solution, sometimes there's things that are just harder for the AI to create than others. The way tags influence each other is not always obvious. The trick is to find the right balance between enough detail and not too much detail.