Identity images, appearance text, regenerating, groups, non-human cast — and why faces drift without them.
A film falls apart when a character's face changes between shots. Identity is how StoryDirector stops that happening — and it is the one part of the pipeline where a few minutes of your attention buys a visibly better film.
When a shot continues from the previous shot's final frame, the model re-derives everyone's face from that frame. That works for a moment. But a final frame is whatever the last instant of the shot happened to be — someone mid-turn, someone in motion, someone looking away — and a face rebuilt from a face that was already half-guessed drifts. In our own testing, faces were visibly wrong by the second hop.
So StoryDirector does not rely on the frame. Characters who have an approved identity carry that identity into every shot they appear in, including every hop of a chain. The identity image is the thing keeping your lead recognisable in shot eleven.
Which is why order matters
Generate and approve your cast on the Director Review, before you approve and start rendering. An identity added after twelve shots have rendered does not retroactively fix those shots.
The Director Review shows one card per character the engine found in your story. You can work through them one at a time, or use Generate all characters, which starts every character that still needs one.
It skips anyone who already has a generated model, anyone whose generation is already running, and anyone who has already used their free generation — then tells you how many it started and how many it skipped, and why. Groups are reported separately, because they work differently (see below).
Each character in a story gets one free identity generation. After that, generating another image for that character uses credits.
That is per character, per story — so a five-character story has five free generations, and reusing the same character in a new story gets a fresh one. Regeneration credits are taken when the work starts and returned if it fails, so a failed generation does not cost you.
Free before paid
Editing a character's written description is always free. Fix the words first, look at what they produce, and only then spend a regeneration — not the other way round.
Every character has editable appearance text: display name, gender presentation, age range, descent, height, build, hair, and wardrobe. These are what the identity image is generated from, and what carries likeness on models that cannot take reference images at all.
Two things follow from that. First, vague text produces a generic person — "tall" and "dark hair" describe several million people. Second, this text keeps working even when the reference images don't: on a model with no reference capability, your description is the character.
Do
Don't
Start over clears the generated model for a character — and, if you had approved it, the approved reference that went with it. Your source photo, if you uploaded one, stays.
Use it when a character's identity is wrong in a way editing cannot fix, rather than stacking regenerations on top of a bad starting point.
Not everyone in a story is a person the engine can give a face to. Crowds, squads, choruses — the engine recognises these as groups, and deliberately does not generate an identity image for them. The video model casts them from your description at render time.
This is the right behaviour: an identity image is a single specific face, and a crowd does not have one. If somebody in that group matters, name them in your story. A named person becomes their own character with their own card.
Animals and creatures get the same identity seat as anyone else. But there is no species field anywhere in StoryDirector — the engine reads species out of your words: the character's name, their aliases, and their description.
So be explicit. "Bramble, an old badger" works. "Bramble" alone leaves the engine guessing at a human. And names that double as human names — Fox, Wolf, Robin, Drake, Hawk — are deliberately not treated as species, because there is no way to tell a fox from someone surnamed Fox. If yours is literally an animal, say so in the description.
The asymmetry behind that rule
Guessing that a person named Fox is an animal would strip them of their wardrobe and let the model reinvent their clothes every shot. Missing a genuinely-named Fox is the cheaper mistake, so that is the one the engine makes.
When a character carries a consented photo reference, StoryDirector treats that photograph as authoritative for the face — and deliberately stops applying your story's visual style over it.
The reason is simple once stated: if you chose a hand-drawn style and the engine also handed the model a photograph, it would be arguing with itself about what that person looks like. Generated characters take the full style treatment; a real face does not.
Characters you have built can be saved and reused. When StoryDirector spots a likely match from your library it offers it — it never binds a saved identity to a new story on its own. You confirm the link, and choose which wardrobe to bring across if the character has more than one.
Keeping a linked character's approved identity is free. It is the same face, so there is nothing to generate.
Different video models accept character references differently — some take registered elements with a low ceiling, some take numbered reference images with a higher one, and some take neither and rely on your description. This is worth knowing when a shot has a lot of people in it.
Choosing Your Video Model covers which is which.
Your cast has faces. Now they need somewhere to stand — Set Generation covers the image every shot in a scene is built on.
Ready to direct one of your own?