Character Sheets with MiniMax-H3

A prompt that turns a handful of reference photos into a clean 8-panel character sheet — angles on top, detail close-ups underneath — in a single 5-frame generation.

H3 is a video model, but it does not have to be used as one. Ask it for a frozen frame and it will happily lay out a reference sheet for you. Five frames is the node minimum, which is about 0.2 seconds of video, so this costs a fraction of a normal clip. Export any frame and that frame is your sheet.

The sheet is not a piece of concept art. It is a documentation sheet of a design you already have: the same object, from angles you do not have yet, on a neutral backdrop, at a consistent scale and under consistent light. That is exactly what you need to feed back into image-to-video work, where identity drift between shots is the usual problem.

Free to use, no strings. Take it, change it, share what you make with it.

Two examples, one prompt, zero edits

Both sheets below came out of the same prompt text. Nothing in it was changed between them — only the five reference images in the slots. That is the point of the technique: the subject is never described in words, so there is nothing to rewrite when you swap it.

Example 1

Five references of one armour set — three full views and two close-ups:

Note there is no side view among them. The strict profile in panel 3 of the sheet is constructed by the model from the views that do exist.

Example 2

A completely different set — different silhouette, different palette, large burning wings, and a figure with a different build. Same prompt, untouched.

Note how the wings, which exist only as a spread shape in the references, keep the same silhouette across all four angles and are cropped out of the close-ups rather than being repeated in them.

What came out

Eight panels in two rows, in both cases.

Top row, four full views: front · three-quarter · strict side profile · back. Same scale, same height, same camera distance, same light. Only the angle changes.

Bottom row, four close-ups: head and shoulders · chest and waist · arm and hand · leg and foot. Each area appears once, shot straight on.

Settings

mode              Ref2VA
length            5 frames        (node minimum; 5 % 17 == 5, valid without padding)
resolution        1024 x 1024     (1.05 MP; H3's native canvas is a 768 short edge, so this is
                                   slightly above it and still behaves)
ref_image_size    max             (2048 short edge — keeps fine engraving readable; slower,
                                   because reference tokens ride through every sampling step)
sampler           res_multistep
scheduler         simple
steps             20
guider            BasicGuider (H3 weights are CFG-distilled, there is no negative prompt field)

Because there is no negative prompt path, every constraint is written as prose inside the positive text. This matches MiniMax's own official ComfyUI templates, which end with lines like No text, subtitles, logos or watermarks of any kind.

The prompt

Full text in prompt_character_sheet.txt. It follows the six-section Ref2VA format from MiniMax's official rewrite guide: subject_definitions · summary · retention_analysis · detailed_description · overall_soundscape · non_diegetic_music.

Three things in it do the heavy lifting.

1. Take it as it is. A block stating that every plate, strap, buckle, spike, colour and finish keeps exactly what it has in the references, that nothing is redesigned, simplified, tidied, embellished or improved, and that this is documentation of an existing design rather than a new one.

2. A black mannequin instead of a wearer.

The subject is worn on a PLAIN MATTE BLACK MANNEQUIN: a featureless display figure of uniform flat black with no face, no eyes, no mouth, no hair, no skin texture, no visible seams and no joints, smooth and completely non-reflective, present only to hold the armour in its proper shape.

Without this the model invents a wearer, and that invented face is slightly different in every panel — which defeats the entire point of a reference sheet. With it, wherever the armour leaves the body open you get flat black instead of skin, and the panels finally agree with each other.

3. Every panel named, and named as distinct. Early runs produced two identical head crops and two identical leg crops, because only two close-up references existed and the model simply repeated them. Naming the four areas explicitly and stating that each appears once and none repeats another fixed it.

Making it your own

The prompt is written to be subject-agnostic. <Subject 1> is defined only as the subject shown across the reference images — no colours, no materials, nothing that could contradict what the model can already see in your photos. Swap the references and it works on a different armour set with no edits at all.

For mounts and vehicles, delete the A-pose line.

For weapons, keep the top row and rename the bottom four crops to the parts that carry the identity — grip, guard, blade, pommel.

For characters, drop the mannequin block and let the person be the subject; keep everything else.

For a turnaround video instead of a sheet — a slow full rotation on a neutral backdrop, from which you pull full-resolution frames — the same approach works with the panel layout removed. That gives you every angle at the full frame size rather than a quarter of it, at the cost of a real clip instead of five frames.

Notes from the runs

• Panel 3 first came out as a second three-quarter. Writing strict profile at exactly 90 degrees, the far arm and far leg hidden behind the near ones, the face seen edge-on fixed it.
• Close-ups came out doubled until each was named and declared distinct.
• The invented wearer's face drifted between panels until the mannequin replaced it.
• A grid layout is a known weak spot for video models — panels bleed into each other. The bans on repeated panels, overlapping panels, tilted panels and panel drop-shadows are there for that reason, and the composition is declared a frozen frame where every frame is identical to the first.

---

A ComfyUI workflow is work in progress and will be added here.