Our character turnaround workflow, and why drift is the real problem

The hardest part of AI animation is not making a striking character. It’s making the same character twice.

Ask any image model for a character and you get a good picture. Ask for the same character from behind, in a different light, in a new outfit, and the face shifts, the hair changes, the jacket forgets itself. We call that drift. It is why most AI animation looks like a series of strangers.

Our turnaround workflow, in outline

Step 1. Define the character before any render. Name, role, and what must never change, written down once.

Step 2. Look-dev. We explore the visual direction until one anchor image is right.

Step 3. Lock the description. The approved appearance is copied word for word into every prompt. Paraphrasing is where drift begins.

Step 4. Build the turnaround sheet. Front, three-quarter, side and back views from that anchor, in an image model.

Step 5. QA gate. Face, hair, outfit and mood are checked across every angle. A failed sheet goes back and is re-locked. Nothing moves on until it passes.

Step 6. Motion last. Only a locked character goes to image-to-video, and motion is the only job that tool does.

An honest note: consistency is a range, not a guarantee. We don’t promise perfect. We promise a gate that catches what the model gets wrong.

We use this workflow to build the characters in Obsidian Tactical, and it is how we’d set up a pipeline for a studio or a brand. The schema and the prompts stay in-house. If you’d like a pipeline built for your project, get in touch.