Writing a fantasy romance using AI - Part 1: Character Generation

Delete

⬝

1 year ago

Hiiii. I'm a romance fiend. I consume romance novels of all types - fanfic, high fantasy, enimies to lovers (personal favorite), forced proximity, historical romance, queer romance.

You name it, I've read it (or will read it once my library gets the book in stock)

I have always wanted to write a romance, but I've never been able to write. I'll write out character names, a plot, even a title, and then when it comes time to put pen to paper, I'm overly critical of every sentence I write, and I don't produce anything.

So, if you're interested, I'm gonna try to use Midjourney and ChatGPT to write a romance fantasy novel.

First things first. Let's use midjourney to create some characters.

Disclaimer: I'm assuming you know how to use midjourney through discord

First Attempt

I know I want to write about a woman and a man in a Game of Thrones-esque world. With that in mind, time to get creative.

Here's the prompt I'm starting with (sourced from Kaedim on Medium)

full body view, orthographic full view of [Character name] facing the camera, orthographic full view of [Character name] facing away from the camera

I've modified it as follows:

full body view, orthographic full view of Lea facing the camera, orthographic full view of Lea facing away from the camera

This is the output. It's alright, but doesn't capture the style I'm going for or the features of the character.

The fourth image is close, but too pirate-y, not enough game of thrones vibes.

Second Attempt

This time, I've added details about Lea and what I want her to look like. I also added the tag --ar 3:2 to set the aspect ratio. 3:2 gives you a bit more space for character gen.

full body view of Lea, game of thrones healer, curly brown hair, brown eyes, orthographic full view of Lea facing the camera, orthographic full view of Lea facing away from the camera --ar 3:2

This is a waaaay better result:

I then scaled up the third pic (my favorite)

She's beautiful 😭

Generating more versions of my main character

Again, taking from Kaedim on Medium, these are the steps to generate consistent character art

Open the image in a tab and paste that into your prompt
Reply with an :envelope: emoji - this will make the midjourney bot DM you a seed number of the post you reacted to
Use the seed number as a tag within the prompt

Which leads to this prompt

https://s.mj.run/tstYF_tskhs, Concept art character, Lea, a 24 year old healer from the world of Game of Thrones, full length body view, orthographic full body view of Lea facing the camera, orthographic full body view of Lea facing away from the camera, hyper detailed, hyperrealistic --ar 3:2 --seed 1323076472

Honestly, for all of the additional work this output wasn't much better than just pressing the variations button.

Making the male lead

This took about 10 tries. I had to tweak the prompt a lot. I also had a lot of trouble generating a consistent face. Here's the two iterations of Sam that I'm going with. I used the seeding method explained above to generate these images

full body view of Sam, handsome, 25 years old, medieval, rich, black hair, green eyes, tall, orthographic full view of Sam facing the camera, orthographic close up of Sam similng at the camera --ar 3:2 --seed 3909091676

Meet Sam