AI Costume & Outfit Consistency

Wardrobe is established once, then referred to

The instinct is to describe the clothes in every shot. It is the wrong move, and expensively so: a paragraph of wardrobe in a shot prompt competes with the face for the model's attention, and in a tall frame it pulls the camera back far enough to shrink the head until identity is gone. A pale overcoat filling seventy percent of the frame with a tiny face on top is a real failure mode, not a hypothetical.

So clothing lives on the character's reference sheet, and shots refer to the person rather than re-describing the outfit. What the sheet establishes, every shot inherits.

At a glance

The line between a state and a sentence

This is the distinction that decides whether you need a second image, and it comes from how reference-conditioned video models behave: they copy what is in the picture — face, garments, accessories, structure — almost verbatim, and they accept as text anything that sits on top of the picture as a global effect — weather, time of day, light, dirt.

• Make a reference image when the garment changes: a complete change of outfit, a transformation, armour on instead of robes, a uniform instead of civilian clothes, burned or torn beyond recognition.
• Write it as text when the garment is the same and something is happening to it: soaked, snow-covered, bloodstained, sleeves rolled, coat carried instead of worn.
• Two forms that can appear in the same frame are not states — they are two characters, or a character and a prop.

Getting this line wrong in the direction of too many images is the common error: early on, most auto-detected “states” were things like holding a cup or a lamp being lit. Those are text. The pipeline now caps how many states it will propose per character precisely because over-generating them costs money and buys nothing.

Two outfits written into one description

Scripts routinely write a character's wardrobe as an arc — early episodes in one thing, later in another, plus a wedding look. Handed all three as a single description, the render draws a figure wearing half of each. So the description is split structurally before any image is generated: the first outfit stays on the base sheet, and the rest become separate state images. Part labels (footwear, accessories, fabric) are recognised as parts of one outfit rather than as a second one.

Which image a given shot uses

Per shot, in priority: a state chosen for that specific segment, then a per-episode override image, then a state assigned for that episode, then the base sheet. Only states that have actually been rendered count — if a state exists on paper but has no image, the shot falls back to the base sheet and carries the difference as text instead, so the change is still described even when there is no picture of it.

Assignment is automatic: after a shot list is generated, a pass decides which segments use which state and writes it down. It is done per segment rather than per episode on purpose — a flashback outfit applied to a whole episode would put the character in the wrong clothes for every shot in it.

What it will not do

• Dress a character from a photo of a real garment. You can upload a reference image for a character, but there is no garment-transfer feature.
• Change an outfit in a rendered shot. Wardrobe is fixed at generation. Changing it means rendering again.
• Keep a state you never rendered. States without images fall back to the base sheet plus text.
• Preserve manual per-segment state picks through a shot-list regeneration. Those are recalculated; episode-level choices survive.
• Hold up under a long coat in a vertical full-length frame. Known limit: the garment wins and the face shrinks. Use closer framing.

What it costs

Each state image is a generated image: 7 credits. Your first project includes 15 free reference images across characters, locations and props, and state images have their own separate free allowance in that first project — so trying one costs nothing. Text-only changes cost nothing at all, which is the main reason the state-versus-sentence line is worth learning. See character sheets for how the base image is built, and the pricing page for rates.

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