DEV Community: Naveed W

Does Tsubaki.3 Understand Complex Editing Instructions, or Just Guess? 9 Relationship-Based Tests

Naveed W — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:30:47 +0000

I have run enough AI edits to know the easy ones do not tell you much. Change a color, remove an object, swap a background, and most editors manage that fine.

The harder question is what happens when an instruction depends on how things relate to each other. The model either understands that relationship, or it drops the right objects in and hopes.

That second case is what advanced AI image editing really means, and it is what I set out to test.

I gave Tsubaki.3 nine edits that only work if it reasons about how elements connect: where things go relative to each other, what an object is made of, what changing the weather does to everything around it, and which of two similar characters an instruction points to.

Plain object placement passes none of them. Here is how it did, grouped by the kind of thinking each one demanded rather than in the order I ran them.

What makes an edit complex

Complexity here does not come from the number of changes. It comes from how the changes depend on each other.

"Change the dress, the bag, and the hair color" is three edits, but they are independent. Nothing about one affects the others. That is not complex, it is just a longer list.

"Move the handbag from the table into her left hand while keeping the cup in front of her" is different. Now the model has to understand position, ownership, and what stays put.

That is complex AI image editing, because the instruction carries relationships, not just objects. Every test below is built that way. I wanted natural language image editing to earn its name, so each prompt describes a situation, not a checklist.

How I scored

This is really an AI image editing test with a strict rubric. I rate every result out of 10, and I judge it on five things: whether the model understood the instruction, whether it got the positions and relationships right, whether the related changes stayed visually logical, whether it preserved the parts it was not asked to touch, and whether the result would be useful in real work.

Everything ran on Tsubaki.3, PixAI's newest model. The basic editing workflow is covered in the Edit Pro guide. This is the harder version of that.

Relationships, ownership, and meaning

The first group of tests asks the model to understand what an instruction points to, not just which nouns it names.

Moving objects and getting the relationships right

This checks spatial understanding: two objects swap places, and one has to end up in the correct hand. For the source image I used a body aesthetic LoRA.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene of a young woman sitting at a small round cafe table
by a window. On the table in front of her sits a closed red handbag on the
left and a tall iced coffee on the right. Her hands rest in her lap. A folded
newspaper leans against the table leg on the floor. Warm afternoon light,
detailed modern anime illustration

EDIT
Using this exact image, move the red handbag from the table into her right hand
so she is holding it up, and move the iced coffee to the left side of the table
where the bag was. Keep the newspaper on the floor exactly where it is, and
keep her seated in the same pose. Do not change anything else.

It handled every relationship correctly. The bag moved into her right hand with a natural grip, the coffee shifted to the left where the bag had been, and the newspaper stayed exactly where it was on the floor.

The best part is that the model rebuilt her arm to hold the bag while keeping the pose and anatomy coherent, which is what you want from a real edit. Overall: 9.5.

Test 1 - Left source. Right after the edit.

Changing material without changing the object

This tests whether the model can separate what an object is from what it is made of.

SOURCE
A cinematic still life, a single ornate teapot with a curved spout and a
looped handle sitting on a plain wooden table, soft window light from the left,
neutral grey background, detailed modern anime illustration.

EDIT
Using this exact image, change the teapot's material from matte ceramic to
polished chrome metal, keeping its exact same shape, spout, handle, size, and
position. The metal should show realistic reflections of the room and a bright
highlight from the window on the left, with the reflection of the light falling
correctly on the table. Do not change the teapot's design or anything else in
the scene.

The material change kept the shape and got the physics right. The teapot became chrome while its spout, handle, and size stayed the same, and the reflections and the window highlight landed on the correct left side.

One thing to note on the source: the base image put a decorative anime figure on the teapot's body, which I never asked for, a reminder that the model likes to embellish. The edit dropped that surface art when it swapped to metal, which was fine here. Overall: 9.3.

Test 2 - Left source. Right after the edit.

Editing only one of two similar characters

This is exclusion logic. Two near-identical girls, and the edit must touch only one, identified by what she is holding.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene of two girls standing side by side, both wearing
identical white hoodies and blue jeans. The girl on the left holds a
skateboard, the girl on the right holds a basketball. Plain street background,
detailed modern anime illustration, full body.

EDIT
Using this exact image, change only the hoodie of the girl holding the
basketball to bright red, and give only her a black cap. Leave the girl with
the skateboard completely unchanged, still in her white hoodie with no cap.
Keep both their faces, poses, jeans, and the objects they are holding exactly
the same.

It edited the correct girl and left the other one alone. Only the basketball girl's hoodie turned red, only she got the cap, and the skateboard girl stayed in her white hoodie. You can see a little drift in the basketball girl's hair color, though.

The model understood "the girl holding the basketball" as a way to identify one person, which is harder than it looks with two similar characters. Overall: 9.5.

Test 7 - Left source. Right after the exclusion edit.

I also ran a bigger edit on the same source, moving both girls into a pool scene with new outfits, activities, and poolside props. That result carried a lesson about unmentioned objects, so I have saved it for the limits section below.

Editing text and layout together

This one uses an AI image editor with text prompts to make several typography changes at once, without disturbing the design.

SOURCE
A modern anime event poster, a DJ girl with headphones in the lower right, a
bold title "NEON NIGHTS" across the top, a small subtitle "Summer Festival"
beneath it, empty dark space in the upper left, a clean graphic layout with a
pink and blue color scheme. Detailed poster illustration.

EDIT
Using this exact image, replace the main title "NEON NIGHTS" with "ELECTRIC
DAWN", change the subtitle to "Rooftop Sessions", add a small date line "AUG 30"
in the upper left empty space, and add a small circular badge reading "18+" in
the bottom left corner. Keep the DJ girl, her position, the color scheme, and
the overall layout the same, and keep all text clear of her face.

Every text change landed, and the layout held. The title became "ELECTRIC DAWN", the subtitle changed, the date went into the empty upper-left space, and the "18+" badge appeared in the corner.

All of it spelled correctly, stayed off her face, and kept the pink-and-blue design intact. Short, controlled text like this renders cleanly, which is a genuine strength for poster work. Overall: 9.8, the highest of the run.

Following a chain of consequences

The next two tests give the model one concept and ask it to work out everything that concept implies.

One weather change, every knock-on effect

Here the instruction is one idea, rain, that should trigger a chain of related changes. This is the real test of scene logic.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene of a girl standing on a sunny city sidewalk in summer,
bright blue sky, sharp shadows, dry pavement, she wears a light sundress and
sunglasses, smiling, holding a closed umbrella loosely at her side. Detailed
modern anime illustration, full body.

EDIT
Using this exact image, turn this from a sunny afternoon into a heavy rainstorm
at the same spot, and make every change that would logically follow. The sky
should be dark and overcast, the pavement wet and reflective with puddles, rain
falling and dripping, her hair and dress damp, and she should now be holding
the umbrella open above her head, her expression shifting from a bright smile to
a smaller, cooler look. Keep it the same girl in the same place. Do not add
other people.

This is where the model showed real understanding. It did not just lay rain over the image.

The sky darkened, the pavement turned wet and reflective with puddles, her hair and dress came out damp, the closed umbrella opened above her head, and her bright smile cooled to a smaller expression.

Every consequence of "it is raining now" arrived together, which is exactly what the instruction was checking. Overall: 9.7, the strongest scene transformation of the set.

Cause and effect, a spilled glass

One physical action should ripple through the whole scene. This tests whether the model understands consequences.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene of a girl sitting at a dining table smiling at the
viewer, a tall full glass of red juice standing upright near her hand, a white
plate with food in front of her, a book lying open on the table to her left,
warm indoor light. Detailed modern anime illustration.

EDIT
Using this exact image, show the moment right after she has knocked the glass
of red juice over. The glass is now lying on its side, red juice spilled across
the table spreading toward the open book, a few drops running off the table
edge, her smile replaced with a shocked open-mouthed expression and her hands
pulled back. The spill should be soaking into the pages of the book nearest to
it. Keep the plate, the room, and her seat the same.

The model told the whole cause-and-effect story, not just a tipped glass.

The glass lies on its side, the juice spreads toward the book and soaks the pages, a stream runs off the table edge, and her smile flips to open-mouthed shock with her hands pulled back.

It understood that one action produces several connected results and rendered all of them. Overall: 9.7.

Where understanding reaches its limits

The model reasons about meaning very well. The next tests are where that reasoning runs into physics and unstated intent.

Moving the sun and the shadows

This moves into physics. Change the time of day, and the shadows and reflections all have to obey the new light.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene of a girl standing in the middle of an empty city plaza
at noon, harsh overhead sun, short dark shadows pooled directly under her and
under a lamppost, a glass storefront on the left reflecting the bright sky, a
fountain on the right catching sunlight. Detailed modern anime illustration,
full body.

EDIT
Using this exact image, change the time from noon to late golden-hour sunset
with the sun low on the right side of the frame. Make every shadow long and
stretched to the left to match the low sun, including hers and the lamppost's.
Warm the whole scene to orange, change the storefront glass on the left to
reflect the orange sunset instead of blue sky, and make the fountain water
catch warm golden highlights. Keep the girl, the plaza, and every object in the
same position. Only the light, shadows, and reflections should change.

The lighting transformation was excellent, but the light source itself got the physics wrong.

The long leftward shadows, the warm orange grade, and the golden highlights on the fountain all came out well. The problem is the sun. It rendered as a huge, blown-out disk hanging in front of the buildings rather than low on the horizon behind them, and the storefront reflected a second literal sun.

I ran the edit twice and got the same issue both times. This is the useful finding: the model reasons about light and shadow very well, but it does not place a light source that obeys the scene's existing geometry. Overall: 8.2.

Test 5: Left to right source, first sunset attempt, second attempt.

Staging a complex action scene

This test adds a new character mid-action and asks for a specific physical interaction. I used a rooftop scene with a falling sign, and asked for a well-known superhero to swing in and stop its fall.

SOURCE
A cinematic modern anime scene on a high-rise rooftop in a dense city at sunset.
A young anime boy and a young anime girl are standing near the rooftop edge
beside a large maintenance air-conditioning unit. The boy has short dark hair,
wears a blue hoodie and black cargo pants, and is holding a skateboard. The girl
has long brown hair, wears a yellow jacket and dark jeans, and is holding a small
backpack. A large advertising sign on the rooftop has partially broken loose and
is hanging at an angle over the edge. Wind is blowing their clothes and hair.
Tall skyscrapers fill the background, warm sunset light, dramatic clouds,
detailed modern anime illustration, cinematic composition, full body.

EDIT
Using this exact image, show the moment after the advertising sign has broken
completely free from the rooftop and is falling toward the street below.
Spider-Man has arrived from the upper right and has attached several webs to the
falling sign, pulling it away from the rooftop and slowing its descent. The sign
should be clearly separated from the building, with its broken supports and
cables trailing behind it. Have the boy and girl move closer to the rooftop edge
and lean forward slightly as they look down at the falling sign with shocked,
concerned expressions. Keep the boy's skateboard and the girl's backpack. Show
the street far below between the buildings, with small distant cars and
pedestrians visible to establish the height of the rooftop. Keep the rooftop, AC
unit, buildings, sunset, and other existing elements unchanged. Keep the same boy
and girl recognizable with their original faces, hair, clothing, and identities.
Do not add any other characters.

The scene logic came together, but the physical interaction did not.

The model added the new character, detached the sign, showed the street far below for scale, and had the boy and girl lean over the edge in shock, all while keeping the rooftop and both characters intact.

Where it fell short is the webs. Instead of a few taut lines showing force pulling the sign, it drew many loose crossing strands, and the hero ended up crouched on top of the sign rather than swinging in to pull it. So it stages a complex action well but struggles with the physics of a specific interaction. Overall: 8.7.

Test 8 - Left source. Right after the edit.

The object it would not remove

Back to the two girls from the exclusion test. I ran a second, bigger edit on that source, moving both into a pool scene with new outfits, activities, and poolside props.

EDIT
Using this exact source image, transform the two girls into a sunny summer pool
scene while keeping the same two girls, their faces, hair, and overall character
identities recognizable. Move them from the street into a modern outdoor swimming
pool. Change their outfits into simple stylish summer swimwear appropriate for a
pool day. Have the girl who originally held the skateboard sitting on the edge of
the pool with her feet in the water, while the girl who originally held the
basketball is standing in the shallow water holding a colorful beach ball. Add
realistic poolside details: a few inflatable pool floats, two lounge chairs,
folded towels, a small table with cold drinks, and a small pet dog sitting beside
the pool watching them. Use bright summer sunlight, blue water with realistic
reflections, and a clean resort-like background. Keep both girls clearly
recognizable as the same characters. Do not add other people. Make the
composition cinematic and naturally integrated rather than looking like separate
elements pasted into a new background.

The transformation worked, but it carried over one thing it should not have. Both girls stayed recognizable, the pool setting and props all appeared, and the activities matched the prompt.

The odd part is the skateboard, which the model kept beside the girl even though she is now in swimwear at a pool. I never said remove it, so the model left it.

That shows the honest limit: it will not drop an object unless you tell it to, even when the new scene makes that object senseless. Overall: 9.

Test 7 - Left source. Right after the pool transformation.

Everything at once

For the last test I combined every kind of understanding into a single instruction. Six interdependent changes, each of which has to stay logical with the others.

SOURCE
A cinematic anime scene inside a cozy bookshop cafe on a sunny afternoon. A girl
in a yellow raincoat sits at a wooden table by a large window on the left,
smiling, holding a closed book in her right hand, an empty ceramic mug on the
table in front of her. A black cat sleeps on the windowsill. Behind her, tall
bookshelves and a chalkboard menu on the back wall reading "OPEN". Warm sunlight
streams through the window, casting soft shadows to the right. A second girl in a
green sweater stands near the shelves holding a stack of books. Detailed modern
anime illustration, wide shot.

EDIT
Using this exact image, change the scene to a quiet night during a thunderstorm,
and make every change that logically follows. Turn the window dark with heavy
rain running down the glass and an occasional lightning flash. Switch the room's
light to warm interior lamplight, so all the shadows now fall away from the lamps
instead of from the window, and the sunlit highlights become soft warm indoor
ones. Fill the empty mug on the table with steaming hot coffee. Change the
chalkboard on the back wall from "OPEN" to "CLOSED". Have the black cat now awake
and sitting up, looking toward the window at the storm. Change only the standing
girl in the green sweater into a warm coat, but leave the seated girl in the
yellow raincoat exactly as she is, still holding her book. Keep both girls' faces,
the table, the mug's position, the bookshelves, and the overall composition the
same.

It got most of a very demanding instruction right. The scene became a night thunderstorm, the interior lighting switched to warm lamplight with the shadow direction flipping to match, the empty mug filled with coffee, the chalkboard changed from "OPEN" to "CLOSED", the cat woke and turned toward the storm, and only the standing girl changed into a coat while the seated girl kept her raincoat and book.

That is a lot of connected logic handled in one pass.

The misses were in the fine detail. The seated girl's face drifted from the original despite the instruction to keep it, and the standing girl's whole outfit changed rather than just the one item. So the big relationships held, and the small exact requirements slipped. Overall: 9.1.

Test 9 - Left source. Right after the edit.

What the best prompts had in common

A few patterns showed up in the AI image editing prompts that worked best.

Stating relationships plainly helped. "Into her right hand" and "to the left side where the bag was" gave the model something exact to reason about, and it delivered.

Naming what to keep helped too, though it is not foolproof. The seated girl in the last test drifted even after I asked to keep her face.

When a light source or a specific physical interaction matters, natural language alone struggles. Those are the cases where instruction-based image editing hits its limit, and you are better off doing the edit in stages or accepting a retry, as I did with the sunset.

What it means for real workflows

For everyday creative work, this holds up well. AI photo editing with prompts is reliable for the things most people need: moving and reassigning objects, changing materials, transforming a scene's weather or time while keeping the character, editing posters and text, and applying a change to one specific subject in a group.

Where I would still plan for extra passes: precise light-source placement, exact physical interactions, and anything where an object needs to disappear because the new context demands it. Those benefit from clearer, staged instructions or a manual touch-up.

My take

Tsubaki.3 understands complex editing instructions better than I expected. When an instruction depends on position, ownership, material, scene logic, or telling two things apart, it grasps the intent and carries it out, and it keeps the related changes visually coherent.

That is the harder half of advanced AI image editing, and it handles it.

The limits are specific and consistent. It does not reliably place a physically plausible light source in a scene it is preserving, it cannot render the mechanics of a precise interaction, and it leaves unmentioned objects in place even when they no longer fit. So it understands meaning and relationships far better than physics and unstated intent.

If you want to see where your own instruction lands, try it on PixAI. Give it a real relationship to reason about, not just a list of changes, and watch how much of the logic it gets.

Can Tsubaki.3 Edit One Thing and Leave the Rest Alone? A Full Editing Stress Test

Naveed W — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:38:43 +0000

I run a lot of edits through AI models, and the same thing trips them up every time. They make the change you ask for, then quietly mess up something you did not.

The jacket turns red, but the face shifts with it. You swap one object and the model redraws the whole hand. The crop moves on its own.

That is the real test of AI image editing. Not whether a model can edit image with AI at all, but whether it can change one thing and leave everything else alone.

So I ran Tsubaki.3 through a run of edits that got harder at each step, from a single color change to a full scene swap. I went through PixAI's Edit Pro guide too, but I wanted to put the model through its paces myself.

The two things I am scoring

I score every image out of 10 on two axes.

Instruction following. Whether the model made the change I asked for, and whether it made all of them when I asked for several.

Preservation. Whether the character stayed the same person, and whether the pose, composition, style, lighting, and untouched objects held. The hard part is making an AI image editor preserve details it was never asked to touch, not just landing the edit.

Everything ran on Tsubaki.3, PixAI's newest model, in Ultra mode. I edited the same source image across a whole run, so you see both the change I wanted and the changes I did not.

Round one: the single-edit ladder

The source image

I built the starting image dense on purpose, so there would be plenty for a careless edit to disturb.

A cinematic modern anime portrait of a young street DJ girl standing at a
rooftop party at dusk, caught mid-laugh with her head tilted back. She has a
chin-length silver bob with one neon-blue streak over her left eye, warm brown
skin, a small crescent-moon stud under her right ear, and round orange-tinted
glasses pushed up on her forehead. She wears an oversized cropped varsity
jacket, teal on the left and magenta on the right, over a black tube top, with
layered silver necklaces. Her right hand rests on a pair of gold headphones
around her neck, and she holds a clear soda can in her left hand. Behind her,
string lights, a hazy pink-and-orange sky, distant city towers, and a blurred
crowd. Warm golden-hour light, soft bokeh, rich detail, cinematic modern anime
illustration, half body.

It came out strong, a 9 out of 10. The silver bob, blue streak, two-tone jacket, glasses on the forehead, gold headphones, and the whole rooftop scene all landed.

Two small deviations: the teal and magenta sides ended up reversed, and the clear soda can came out as a normal metallic one.

Everything else gives me a solid baseline with lots of preservation targets: the blue streak, the crescent stud, the glasses, the headphones, the can, the crowd, the sky.

Left: selected image for the review. Right: an alternate from the batch.

Test 1: a simple edit

One isolated change, to set a baseline for targeted AI image editing.

Using this exact image, change only the color of her varsity jacket to solid
deep red. Keep her face, silver bob with the blue streak, glasses on her
forehead, crescent stud, headphones, soda can, pose, and the rooftop
background exactly the same.

The edit worked and the character held. 8.5 out of 10.

The jacket is deep red now, and her face, expression, skin tone, silver bob, blue streak, glasses, headphones, and the whole rooftop stayed consistent. Her pose and the soda can barely moved.

The misses are in the details. "Solid deep red" was not taken literally, so the jacket picked up decorative patches instead of staying plain. And the framing shifted, with black bars appearing at the top and bottom. Even a simple edit nudged the aspect ratio.

Left: the source. Right: the red-jacket edit.

Test 2: a structural edit

Now a change that forces the model to rebuild part of the image: swap the object she is holding.

Using this exact image, replace the soda can in her left hand with a lit
sparkler throwing off small bright sparks. Keep her hand position, her face,
the silver bob and blue streak, the two-tone jacket, glasses, headphones, and
the rooftop background unchanged.

The prop swap is excellent. 9 out of 10.

The can is gone, and the sparkler with its bright spray of sparks looks convincing. Her face, hair, blue streak, glasses, and the background all held.

But "keep her hand position" drifted slightly. The grip looks natural, it is just not the original grip. The black-bar framing shift is still here too.

Left: the source. Right: the sparkler edit.

Test 3: a complex edit

This is a main test. Three coordinated changes in one instruction.

Using this exact image, make three changes together. First, change her hair
from silver to deep purple while keeping the neon-blue streak. Second, pull the
orange glasses down onto her eyes instead of on her forehead. Third, change the
time to night, so the sky is dark blue with the string lights and city glowing
brighter. Keep her face, expression, crescent stud, two-tone jacket,
headphones, soda can, pose, and composition the same.

All three changes landed cleanly. 8.5 out of 10, and probably the strongest edit of the run.

The hair is deep purple with the blue streak still showing. The glasses moved from her forehead down onto her eyes with no facial distortion. And the day-to-night change is convincing: dark blue sky, stars, brighter city windows and string lights.

The model rebuilt the lighting into a real night version instead of just dimming the sunset.

Her identity held through all of it: face, expression, hairstyle shape, and skin tone. The only recurring weakness is the framing drift and black bars.

Left: the previous state. Right: the three-change night edit.

Test 4: an advanced edit

The hardest edit of the round. Several changes at once, plus a full environment swap.

Using this exact image, transform the scene while keeping her recognizable.
Change her outfit to a sleek silver-and-black futuristic racing jacket, put a
glowing microphone in her right hand, and move her from the rooftop to a packed
neon concert stage at night with spotlights, smoke, and a huge crowd of
silhouettes with raised hands. Keep her face, silver bob with the blue streak,
glasses on her forehead, crescent stud, and her mid-laugh expression the same.

The big changes are excellent. 8.5 out of 10.

The racing jacket, the glowing microphone, and the full rooftop-to-concert-stage transformation all came out well, with spotlights, smoke, and a raised-hands crowd. And she is still immediately recognizable through it all, since the bob and blue streak carry her identity.

This is where preservation started slipping. The glasses stayed on her eyes instead of moving back to her forehead, so the model dropped one instruction. And the intense stage lighting washed her warm brown skin much paler.

When the whole scene changes at once, the small, exact details are the first to go.

Left: the previous state. Right: the concert-stage edit.

One thing to understand about editing in steps

Here is a detail that explains a lot of the results above. Each edit ran on the previous image, not the original.

So by Test 3, the jacket was still red from Test 1 and the sparkler was still in her hand from Test 2, even though those prompts mentioned the two-tone jacket and the soda can.

That is not the model failing. It is the model correctly editing the image you gave it, not the one from three steps ago.

Good to know when you chain edits: the model builds on what is in front of it, so restate what matters or start fresh from the original.

Round two: editing a whole story, beat by beat

The ladder tests single edits. This round tests something harder.

I built a short story and edited the same character through it, shot by shot, to see if she still looks like herself by the end.

The scene is a swordswoman in a bamboo forest, edited through six beats. Same character throughout, with strong anchors to track: a black high ponytail with a crimson cord, amber eyes, a cheek scar, a jade earring, and an indigo kimono.

Beat 1: the establishing shot

A cinematic anime film still, a lone young swordswoman standing in a misty
bamboo forest at dawn. She has long black hair in a high ponytail with a single
crimson cord, sharp amber eyes, a thin scar on her left cheek, and a small jade
bead earring. She wears a deep indigo kimono top with silver trim, a grey sash,
and a sheathed katana at her hip, one hand resting calmly on the hilt. Soft
golden dawn light filters through the tall green bamboo, mist curling low around
her feet, petals drifting in the air. Calm, composed expression. Wide
atmospheric shot, muted natural colors, rich detail, cinematic modern anime
illustration.

A 9 out of 10 baseline. Every anchor is there and the forest is atmospheric. The only soft spot is the cheek scar, which comes out subtle.

Beat 2: the threat arrives

Using this exact image and character, keep her face, black ponytail with the
crimson cord, amber eyes, cheek scar, jade earring, and indigo kimono
identical. Change the moment: she has turned her head sharply to the left, eyes
narrowed and alert, her hand now gripping the katana hilt ready to draw. The
mist has thickened and darkened, dawn light dimming to a cold blue, and a tall
shadowy figure looms among the distant bamboo behind her. Same forest, same
framing, tense atmosphere.

Strong story beat, 8.5 out of 10. The head turn, the cold blue shift, and the looming shadow all land as the next shot of the same scene. Her identity held.

The miss was "same framing." The camera moved much closer instead of keeping the wide shot.

Left: beat 1. Right: edited beat 2

Beat 3: the clash

Using this exact character, keep her face, black ponytail with the crimson
cord, amber eyes, cheek scar, jade earring, and indigo kimono identical. Now
show the clash: she has drawn the katana and swings it in a fast diagonal arc,
her ponytail and kimono whipping with the motion, a bright streak of light
trailing the blade. Sparks fly as her sword meets the shadowy attacker's weapon
mid-frame. Speed lines, flying petals and bamboo leaves, dynamic low angle,
cold blue light cut by the flash of the strike. Intense, kinetic anime action.

The best action beat, 9.3 out of 10, on the second try.

My first generation looked great, but you could not tell what she was fighting. I re-rolled, and the second version pulled the shadowy attacker from Beat 2 into the foreground, so the sword impact and the sparks make sense.

Identity and motion are excellent. The attacker's weapon stays a little lost in the silhouette. The lesson: a re-roll rescued the storytelling, not just the looks.

Left: beat 2 as base. Right: beat 3 edited.

Beat 4: the aftermath

Using this exact character, keep her face, black ponytail with the crimson
cord, amber eyes, cheek scar, jade earring, and indigo kimono identical. Final
beat: she stands still with her back mostly to us, sheathing the katana with a
soft click, head lowered, calm again. The shadowy figure is gone, defeated.
Warm golden dawn light returns and breaks through the bamboo, mist clearing,
petals settling. Quiet, resolved, peaceful atmosphere. Wide cinematic closing
shot.

The resolution lands, 8.5 out of 10. Warm dawn returns, the attacker is gone, petals settle, and the wide shot bookends the opening.

The one weak spot is the action itself. The sheathing looks more like holding or drawing the sword. Her face drifts a little, but the rear view hides it.

Left: beat 3 as base. Right: beat 4 edited.

Beat 5: the journey continues

Using this exact character and image, keep her face, black ponytail with the
crimson cord, amber eyes, cheek scar, jade earring, and indigo kimono
identical. Continue the story after the battle: she is now riding a dark
chestnut horse along a narrow mountain path just beyond the bamboo forest,
moving away from the battlefield at dawn. Her katana is fully sheathed at her
hip, and one hand rests lightly on the horse's reins. Her long ponytail and
crimson cord move gently in the morning breeze. The bamboo forest is now behind
her, fading into the mist, while the path opens toward distant mountains and a
small village visible far ahead. Warm golden sunlight breaks through the clouds,
birds flying in the distance, a few petals still drifting behind her. She looks
calm and thoughtful, no longer tense. Wide cinematic anime film still, natural
movement, atmospheric depth, peaceful but purposeful mood, rich detail,
cinematic modern anime illustration.

A genuine new beat, 9 out of 10. The chestnut horse is well rendered, the katana now clearly sheathed, and the forest gives way to mountains and a distant village.

New location, new camera, new direction, same recognizable character. The horse's rear takes up a lot of foreground, and her hair blows harder than "gently," but the story moves forward cleanly.

Left: beat 4 as base. Right: beat 5 edited.

Beat 6: the end of the journey

Using this exact character and image, keep her face, black ponytail with the
crimson cord, amber eyes, cheek scar, jade earring, and indigo kimono
identical. Bring the story to its final scene: she has arrived at a quiet
mountain shrine overlooking the valley at sunset. Her dark chestnut horse
stands peacefully beside her, and her katana remains fully sheathed at her hip.
An elderly shrine keeper stands a short distance away beneath the wooden gate,
waiting for her with a gentle expression, while a small lantern glows beside
the shrine steps. She stands facing the shrine with her back mostly toward us,
one hand resting calmly on the horse's neck, her head slightly raised as she
looks toward the warm sunset beyond the mountains. The bamboo forest is now far
behind her. The sky is painted with soft orange and crimson light, distant
mountains fading into haze, a few birds crossing the sky, leaves moving gently
in the evening breeze. The atmosphere is peaceful, final, and resolved. Wide
cinematic closing shot, quiet emotional ending, rich atmospheric detail,
cinematic modern anime film illustration.

A real ending, 9.2 out of 10. The shrine, the lantern, the elderly keeper, the same horse, and the sunset give the sequence a proper close.

Her anchors held across all six generations. The bigger point: the six images form a real sequence.

Her face rendering drifted across the run, but the hair, cord, earring, kimono, and sword stayed strong enough to carry her through, especially in the rear and side views.

Left: beat 5 as base. Right: beat 6 edited.

Round three: pushing into semi-realistic

For the last round I changed styles completely, using a semi-realistic photorealistic-anime LoRA on Tsubaki.3, and built an even denser scene to edit.

The base: an observatory in a storm

A cinematic photorealistic anime film still of a young Korean woman standing
alone inside a huge glass observatory on a mountain at night during a powerful
rainstorm. She has shoulder-length dark brown hair, slightly damp at the ends,
with one distinctive pale silver hair clip above her right temple, warm dark
brown eyes, natural Korean facial features, and a small beauty mark beneath her
left eye. She wears a long charcoal-gray wool coat over a cream knit sweater, a
dark pleated skirt, black ankle boots, and a thin burgundy scarf loosely
wrapped around her neck. She stands beside a tall telescope, one hand resting
on its metal frame while her other hand holds a small brass flashlight pointed
downward. Behind her, enormous curved glass windows reveal a stormy mountain
landscape, distant city lights far below, heavy rain running down the glass,
dark clouds lit by occasional lightning. The interior contains subtle
scientific instruments, a wooden desk with scattered star charts, a mechanical
clock, books, cables, and small warm lamps. Rain reflections and warm interior
lights create layered reflections across the glass. Wet footprints lead from
the entrance toward her. Cinematic photorealistic anime aesthetic, no text.
Wide cinematic three-quarter shot.

A 9.2 out of 10 base, and a harder test than the swordswoman. Reflections in the glass, wet footprints, two separate hand interactions, a complex telescope, a beauty mark, a hair clip, all things a sloppy edit could easily mess up.

Left: I’ll edit this one below. Right: Just for you to see.

The isolated edit: swap the object in her hand

Using this exact image, make only one change: replace the small brass
flashlight in her hand with an old, slightly weathered Polaroid photograph held
naturally between her fingers. Keep everything else exactly the same: her face,
hair, hair clip, eyes, beauty mark, coat, sweater, scarf, skirt, boots, her
pose, the hand position and fingers holding the object, the telescope and her
other hand resting on it, the observatory interior, desk, books, clock, lamps,
cables, wet footprints, curved glass windows, rain, lightning, mountains, city
lights, mist, reflections, lighting, camera angle, framing, and composition.
The photograph should be the only meaningful change.

This was the cleanest isolated edit of the whole project, 9 out of 10, but it took four attempts.

Earlier tries turned the photo into a camera or rebuilt too much. The fourth got it: a small weathered photograph in her hand, the other hand still on the telescope, and the face, hair clip, beauty mark, reflections, footprints, lighting, and composition all intact.

The honest note: a truly isolated edit on a dense scene can need several tries.

Left: the previous state. Right: the edit.

The advanced edit: move her to a whole new place

Using this exact character and image, transform the scene into the next moment
of her story while keeping her unmistakably recognizable. Move her from the
mountain observatory to a quiet mountain railway platform just before sunrise,
standing beside an old stationary train with warm light glowing from its
windows, misty mountains and pine trees around her. The storm has passed.
Change her outfit completely: replace the charcoal coat, cream sweater, dark
skirt, and burgundy scarf with a long camel-colored travel coat over a dark
green knit sweater, a black ankle-length skirt, and dark leather boots. Keep
her face, facial proportions, warm dark brown eyes, dark brown shoulder-length
hair, pale silver hair clip above her right temple, small beauty mark beneath
her left eye, and overall identity exactly recognizable. She holds the same
weathered instant photograph in her right hand, lowered at her side. Do not
turn the photograph into a camera. Remove the telescope and all observatory
equipment. Replace the interior with the railway platform, train, wooden bench,
old station sign without readable text, luggage, small platform lamps, wet stone
pavement, and drifting mist. Wide cinematic three-quarter composition, soft
dawn light, premium photorealistic anime film aesthetic.

The best advanced edit in the set, 9.2 out of 10. Full outfit swap, full environment swap, and she is still unmistakably the same woman, with the hair, clip, eyes, beauty mark, and proportions all carried over.

The photograph is the smart touch here. It stayed a photograph and tied the two scenes together.

Small slips: the station sign shows faint fake text despite the "no text" instruction, and the framing turned more front-facing than asked.

The previous state left and the railway edit right

What changes as the edit gets harder

Put all the tests together and it is simple. An AI image editing test really asks two things: did it make the change, and did it leave everything else alone.

The change itself is reliable. All three changes in Test 3 landed. The full outfit-and-location swap landed. Tsubaki.3 almost always does what you ask, even when you ask for a lot.

The problem is that it also changes things you did not ask it to. The same few issues came up again and again.

The framing moved on its own, and black bars showed up, across the whole first round.

Swapping the object in her hand redrew the whole hand with it.

On the hardest edit, it skipped one of my instructions, since the glasses stayed put in Test 4.

Her face slowly changed across the six story shots, though the back and side views hid most of it.

The one detailed edit on the observatory took four tries to get right.

Two things helped. First, I told it what to keep, not just what to change. The details I repeated in every prompt, the hair, the eyes, the markings, are the ones that stayed put.

Second, I kept hard edits simple. One difficult change on its own worked fine. Asking for several at once is where it missed.

Where Tsubaki.3 editing works best

From all of this, here is where I would reach for it.

Correcting a single detail, like a color, an object, or a time of day.

Making controlled variations of an image you want to keep.

Swapping outfits and accessories while holding the character.

Replacing an object, as long as you accept the area around it will be redrawn.

Coordinated multi-changes, two or three at once, which it handles better than I expected.

Story continuity, carrying one character across new scenes, which makes it a strong pick for AI anime image editing and short film-style sequences.

Where I would slow down: anything needing pixel-exact framing, a single tiny change on a busy scene where you should expect retries, or long chains where you need the original details back, in which case start fresh.

My take

Most of the time, Tsubaki.3 can change one thing without messing up the rest. It does this more reliably than most editors I have used, but not perfectly.

It almost always makes the change you ask for, and it holds a character's core identity very well, even through a full outfit and location swap.

What slips is the fine print: framing drifts, hands and nearby areas get rebuilt, and on the hardest edits one instruction can fall through. The more you change at once, the more the small untouched details wander.

The honest verdict is that Tsubaki.3 is strong for edits where the identity matters more than pixel-exact preservation, and it can carry a character through an entire story. Just expect a retry or two on the fiddly ones.

To see where your own image holds and where it drifts, try it on PixAI yourself. Start with one clear edit, then make it harder and watch what moves.

AI Character Design, Start to Finish: One Anime Character Across 10 Generations

Naveed W — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:09:02 +0000

Most people think AI character design means getting one good picture. It does not. The hard part is building a character once, then getting her back again in a new outfit, a new expression, and a new scene, still looking like the same person.

That is what I set out to test. I took one original character through ten generations on Tsubaki.3, PixAI's newest model, starting with rough concept sheets and ending with full cinematic scenes. Rather than march through them one to ten, I have grouped them into the four stages the work really moves through: building the design, developing it, pushing it into scenes, and combining it with a second character. Every prompt and score is below.

How I approached it

Good character design AI work follows a path, not a single prompt. You start wide with concept exploration, lock the direction you like into one clean reference, then use that reference to build everything else. That path is the core of AI character design, not one lucky prompt.

Tsubaki.3 handles natural language, so I wrote full descriptive prompts instead of tag lists, and I repeated every defining feature in every prompt. The model drops details you stop mentioning, so the two-tone braid, the gold eyes, the red rune, the brass arm, and the potion vials appear in almost every prompt below. If you want the structure I leaned on, the PixAI prompt formula guide covers it.

A note on setup that applies throughout: I ran every test on Tsubaki.3 in Ultra mode, generating a batch of four each time. In the image pairs, the left image is the one I reviewed, so my notes always describe that one. The right image is a second pick from the same batch, there for extra visual appeal. Test 7 is the one exception, and I flag it there.

Stage one: building the design

Concept exploration

The first job of any AI character generator is to give you options. I asked for five takes on one idea so I could pick a direction.

A character concept exploration sheet, five distinct full-body design
directions for a young female monster hunter, each visually different: a
rugged wilderness ranger in furs with bone charms, an elegant aristocratic
slayer in a tailored dark coat, a punk street hunter with piercings and a
spiked jacket, an alchemist hunter with a brass mechanical arm and a
bandolier of glowing potion vials, and a shrine-maiden exorcist with a staff
and long paper talismans. Varied silhouettes and color palettes, clean
concept art, neutral poses, plain background, labeled panels.

This was a strong start. Tsubaki.3 gave me all five directions as separate characters instead of blending them into one, and each had its own silhouette and personality.

The alchemist came out the most defined, with the brass arm and potion bandolier showing clearly. That is the direction I carried forward.

The one real weakness was the labels. The model wrote text-like labels under each figure, but they are not real words. That is a common limit with generated images, and it does not hurt the actual AI character concept art.

Left the base run. Right the Clear Style LoRA run.

I ran it twice more. With the Clear Style LoRA, the rendering got cleaner and sharper, but the five designs drifted toward the same face and body, and potion-tube details leaked onto characters that were not the alchemist. A third run with the Glassy Anime style preset came out worst. The plain base run stayed the strongest and most varied, so that is the one I kept.

Locking the design

Once I had the direction, I generated one clean full-body reference. This image becomes the anchor for every test after it.

A full-body character design of a young monster-hunting alchemist, modern
anime style. Athletic, agile build, standing confidently with a faint knowing
smile. Her hair is two-toned, snow-white on top blending into black
underneath, worn in a messy side braid over her right shoulder. Sharp
molten-gold eyes. A small red alchemical rune tattooed just under her left
eye. Her left forearm is a polished brass mechanical prosthetic with visible
gears at the elbow and wrist. A worn leather bandolier crosses her chest,
lined with glowing green and amber potion vials. She wears fitted dark travel
leathers with buckled straps. Neutral standing pose, plain soft-grey studio
background, clean detailed anime character design, crisp linework, soft even
lighting.

Most of the important features landed. The two-tone hair, side braid, gold eyes, brass mechanical arm, and glowing vials all came through, and the arm in particular looks convincing, with visible gears. The rune is the weak spot.

It rests under the eye as asked, but it came out small and a little messy, so it lacks the clarity I would want from a signature feature. The outfit also turned out more revealing than the prompt described.

Even so, this is a solid AI character sheet to build on, and it scored a 9 out of 10 for me. The left image is the reference I used from here forward.

Test 2, Left the reviewed reference. Right an alternate from the batch.

Stage two: developing the character

With the reference set, the next three tests all pull from it: new outfits, new expressions, and a full turnaround.

Outfit variations

I tested it as an AI outfit generator, using the locked reference as a Character Reference.

Using this exact character, show her in four different full-body outfits lined
up side by side, the same young alchemist in each. Keep every defining feature
identical: the snow-white-to-black two-tone messy side braid, the molten-gold
eyes, the small red rune tattoo under her left eye, the brass mechanical left
forearm, and the leather bandolier of glowing potion vials across her chest.
Outfit one, rugged field-hunting leathers under a hooded travel cloak. Outfit
two, an ornate alchemists' guild ceremonial robe with gold embroidery. Outfit
three, relaxed town clothes, an oversized knit sweater and a canvas satchel.
Outfit four, heavy snow-expedition gear with a fur-lined hood and frost
goggles. Same height and build in each, plain background, consistent modern
anime design, clean linework.

Character consistency was the standout. The hair, braid, gold eyes, rune, and face stayed steady across all four looks, and the rune came out cleaner here than when I locked the design. All four outfits are distinct, and the guild robe with its gold embroidery is the best of them.

Test 3, Left the reviewed outfits. Right an alternate from the batch.
The downside is that some accessories get hidden. In the snow gear especially, the mechanical arm and bandolier disappear under the clothing.

The model keeps her identity, but it does not always keep every signature piece visible. A couple of the outer figures also got cropped at the edges.

Expression sheet

Next I tested it as an AI expression sheet generator, six emotions on the same face.

Using this exact character, an expression sheet of six head-and-shoulders
portraits of the same young alchemist, changing only her expression. Keep her
two-tone white-and-black messy braid, molten-gold eyes, the small red rune
under her left eye, and her exact face structure identical in every panel. The
six expressions: a confident smirk, intense focus, worn-out exhaustion, a
bright delighted laugh, cold fury, and wide startled surprise. Plain
background, consistent modern anime style, clean linework.

This was the most consistent test of the whole set. The character stays clearly herself across all six panels, and the expressions are properly different from each other, not small tweaks on one face. The surprised look works especially well, and the rune holds its shape and position throughout.

Two small misses: the framing drops into the upper torso instead of staying head-and-shoulders, and the mechanical arm is not in frame, which makes sense given the crop. Neither hurts the result. I scored this one a 9.4.

Test 4, Left the reviewed expression sheet. Right an alternate from the batch.

Turnaround

Then the technical one, using Tsubaki.3 as a character turnaround generator: front, three-quarter, side, and back.

Using this exact character, a full character turnaround model sheet showing
four views at the same height: front, three-quarter, side profile, and back.
Keep every detail identical across all four, the white-to-black two-tone messy
side braid, molten-gold eyes, the red rune tattoo under her left eye, the brass
mechanical left forearm, the leather bandolier of glowing vials, and her fitted
dark travel leathers. Neutral A-pose, plain grey background, clean model-sheet
linework, even lighting.

This is where Tsubaki.3 is weaker. The four views are all there and the character stays recognizable, and the mechanical arm holds up impressively across every angle. But the side and back views drift.

The braid changes shape and position, and a few clothing and accessory details shift from view to view. The pose also looks more like a natural lineup than a strict A-pose. The straight takeaway: Tsubaki.3 is much better at holding identity and expression than at producing an exact technical turnaround.

The front view is excellent, and the side and back are where the small details wander. I scored it 8.5, still usable, just not precise.

Test 5, Left the reviewed expression sheet. Right an alternate from the batch.

Stage three: pushing into scenes

Sheets are the setup. The real question is whether the character survives once she leaves the plain background.

Key art

Using this exact character, dynamic full-body key art of the young alchemist
mid-battle, hurling a glowing potion that erupts into a burst of green
alchemical fire. Her two-tone braid and coat whip through the motion, her
brass mechanical left arm extended, the vials on her bandolier glowing bright,
the red rune under her gold eye catching the light. Behind her, the massive
shadowed silhouette of a monster looms in billowing smoke. Dramatic rim
lighting, cinematic modern anime illustration, rich detail, full body.

This was probably the best image of the whole run. The character moved from a design sheet into cinematic key art without losing her identity. The mechanical arm, hair, gold eyes, rune, and glowing vials all carried over, the green explosion has real impact, and the monster silhouette gives the scene scale without stealing focus. The one miss is the coat.

The prompt asked for it to whip through the motion, but the character wears it tied around her waist instead. Very dynamic poses like this make some clothing details harder to hold. Even so, her identity survived a big change in composition, which is the point. I scored it 9.2.

Test 6, Left the reviewed key art. Right an alternate from the batch.

A cinematic scene

After the sheets, I wanted to see how far a detailed, story-driven prompt could push it.

Using this exact character, a cinematic modern anime scene on the rooftop
platform of a speeding elevated train at sunset. She wears a stylish modern
black techwear jacket, fitted top, high-waisted cargo pants, and sleek combat
boots. A massive horned monster is leaping between train cars behind her while
she grabs a metal railing with her brass mechanical left hand, twisting around
to look back with a confident grin. Her long two-tone braid whips violently in
the wind, potion vials swinging from her bandolier. A second train races
alongside them, its windows glowing orange, while passengers inside stare in
shock. Below, a sprawling futuristic city rushes past: glowing billboards,
elevated roads, colorful storefronts, distant skyscrapers, and hundreds of
tiny lights. Sunset clouds fill the sky behind the monster, with sparks, loose
papers, and broken glass flying through the air. Vibrant modern anime film
frame, dramatic perspective, extreme sense of speed, rich environment, detailed
modern fashion, cinematic lighting, dynamic composition, vivid colors, polished
anime keyframe, highly detailed.

This test needed two attempts, and that is the useful part. The first generation ignored the story completely and gave me a neon rainy street scene, no train, no monster, no passengers. So I refreshed and ran it again. The second attempt came together.

The elevated train, the speeding city below, the passengers, the sunset, and the monster behind her all showed up, and the whipping braid and flying papers sell the speed. Her whole identity carried over, and the modern techwear outfit looked more convincing this time.

A few things still drifted: she is not grabbing the railing exactly as described, and the second train looks like one track rather than two. The lesson is that a specific, dramatic scene prompt can push Tsubaki.3 into genuine film territory, but you should expect to re-roll it. The revised version scored 9.2.

Test 7, Left the reviewed image. Right an alternate from the batch.

A candid moment

Every test so far was a posed shot. I wanted to see if it could do the opposite, a quiet, unposed moment.

Using this exact character, a candid slice-of-life moment, not posed. The
young alchemist sprawled sideways in a worn armchair on a lazy afternoon, one
leg hooked over the armrest, half-asleep with a book about to slip from her
real hand while her brass mechanical hand dangles a half-eaten pastry.
Sunlight pools across her through a window, dust drifting in the beam. Her
two-tone braid is loose and messy, molten-gold eyes barely open, the red rune
under her eye catching the warm light. Cozy cluttered room softly out of focus
behind her. Natural, unguarded, warm, cinematic modern anime illustration,
off-center composition.

The pose is the win here. She looks comfortable and half-asleep, sunk into the armchair with the book in her hand, and the warm light, dust, books, and worn furniture make the room feel lived-in. Her identity holds up cleanly, and the rune is one of the cleanest versions across all ten tests.

The miss is a small object detail. The pastry rests below the mechanical hand instead of being held by it, so the model included both things but not the exact interaction. The framing is also a little more centered than the prompt asked.

The result feels like a real quiet moment from her life, which is what I was after. I scored it 9.1.

Test 8, Left the reviewed image. Right an alternate from the batch.

One thing I have to tell you: the small red alchemical rune never stayed fully consistent throughout this guide. It is always there, but you will notice it drifts slightly from the base image each time.

Stage four: two characters in one scene

The last two tests do something the design sheets cannot: combine two separate character references into a single scene.

A two-character rescue

I fed it the alchemist and a second character I uploaded.

Using the exact alchemist from @image1 and the exact girl from @image2. A
dramatic but beautiful anime film scene on an old moss-covered stone bridge
surrounded by lush green mountains and wildflowers. The girl from @image2 has
slipped over the edge of the bridge and is falling, reaching upward in
surprise. The alchemist grabs her wrist with her brass mechanical left hand and
braces herself against the stone railing, desperately pulling her back to
safety. Her two-tone braid and potion vials swing with the motion. A small
fluffy cat sits safely on the bridge watching the rescue, while colorful birds
burst from nearby trees. Ferns, vines, flowers, moss-covered stones,
butterflies, and tiny glowing particles fill the foreground. A clear turquoise
river winds through the valley far below, with waterfalls cascading down the
cliffs. In the background, a young boy stands on the bridge, startled and
running toward them. Bright morning sunlight filters through the trees. Strong
sense of height, movement, danger, and friendship, warm beautiful atmosphere.
Vibrant modern anime film scene, cinematic composition, expressive faces,
dynamic pose, rich green environment, natural character interaction, dramatic
perspective, atmospheric depth, highly detailed anime illustration.

The story is clear at a glance. The girl is falling, the alchemist is reaching to save her, and the cat and boy react from the bridge. You understand the moment without the prompt. Both characters stayed recognizable too, the alchemist with her hair, gold eyes, braid, rune, and brass arm, and the second character with her pink hair, blue eyes, white dress, and bow.

The environment does a lot of the work, with the mossy bridge, the valley, the waterfalls, and the butterflies giving you plenty to look at.

The miss is the contact point. The alchemist reaches toward the falling girl, but whether she is gripping the wrist at all is ambiguous in the left image, and the boy looks more like a background extra than part of the moment.

The right image handles it better. Still, combining two references into one narrative scene is a real step up from a character sheet. I scored it 9.3.

Test 9, Left the reviewed scene. Right an alternate from the batch.

Modern fashion transformation

For the last test, I kept both characters but changed everything else, swapping their fantasy roles for modern fashion.

Using @image1 and @image2 as character references. Keep both girls recognizable
with their original facial features, hair colors, eye colors, and identities,
but completely replace their fantasy outfits and roles with modern fashion. A
cinematic close-up of both girls relaxing together inside a stylish contemporary
creative lounge, dressed like modern Japanese fashion models. @image1 wears an
oversized charcoal blazer over a fitted cream top, a short pleated skirt, sheer
black tights, silver earrings, and sleek loafers. @image2 wears a soft blue
cropped cardigan, a white pleated skirt, delicate jewelry, and fashionable
sneakers. They sit together on a curved designer sofa, laughing naturally over
colorful iced drinks, leaning slightly toward each other as they look at
something on a phone. Around them are lush indoor plants, chrome furniture, art
books, vinyl records, a small neon sign, abstract artwork, hanging lights, and
large glass windows overlooking a distant sunset. Warm sunset light mixes with
soft colorful interior lighting, natural expressions, fashionable layered
clothing, detailed fabric textures, intimate friendship moment, close-up
cinematic framing, vibrant modern anime film aesthetic, polished anime
illustration.

Identity preservation carried the test. The alchemist kept her white-to-black hair, gold eyes, rune, and face, and the second character kept her pink hair, blue eyes, and bow, while both moved convincingly into modern outfits.

The lounge feels contemporary and social, and the phone gives them a natural reason to sit together rather than just pose. Two things to note. The close-up became more of a medium shot showing most of their bodies, and the alchemist's mechanical arm is gone entirely.

That last one makes sense, since I asked to change her role and outfit, but it means her identity now rests on her face and hair rather than her strongest design feature. I scored it 9.2.

Test 10, Left the reviewed image. Right an alternate from the batch.

What held, and what drifted

A few patterns ran through all ten generations. Consistency is the top strength. Tsubaki.3 held the character's face, hair, and signature details across outfits, expressions, and full cinematic scenes. It also combines two references well, keeping both characters recognizable in a single scene, which is hard for most tools.

The weak points are just as clear. Turnarounds are the soft spot, since side and back views drift, so this is better for identity and expression than for an exact multi-view model sheet.

It follows the big picture, not the fine print, so object interactions, exact framing, and specific poses often come out approximate, like the pastry, the coat, and the wrist grab. And tiny details drift the most. The small red rune under her eye was the least consistent feature of the whole run.

It is in almost every image, but its shape and clarity shift a little each time, so a small marking like that is the first thing to wander from the base design.

Two habits handle most of this. Name every feature, every time, since the model drops details you stop repeating. And when a scene prompt is complex, expect a re-roll, because a specific, dramatic prompt gives cinematic results but does not always land on the first try.

How to keep a character consistent

If you plan to reuse a character, the reference workflow above will carry you a long way. Set your locked design as a Character Reference and build from it, exactly as I did from the second test onward. PixAI's Reference Pro guide covers that in depth. For a character you will use constantly, the stronger move is to train a character LoRA on PixAI. That turns your design into a model you can call any time instead of referencing an image on every generation.

Your next step

Anime character design with AI is a process. You explore directions, lock one, then develop it through outfits, expressions, and scenes, checking consistency at each step.

Tsubaki.3 handles most of that well, and it is strongest exactly where it counts, keeping your character recognizable as you move her around.

If you want to build your own character this way, try it on PixAI. Start with a concept sheet, lock the one you like, and reference it forward. You will have a usable character in a handful of generations.

I Tested an AI Manga Generator Across 8 Scenes: Every Prompt, Panel, and Speech Bubble

Naveed W — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:10:26 +0000

I went into this expecting the pictures to be the challenge. They were not. Across eight scenes, the composition scored above 9 more often than not. The words in the bubbles were where things came apart.

That split is the whole story of using an AI manga generator today, so I want to organize this review around it rather than march through the scenes one by one. A good anime picture and a real manga panel are different problems. You can prompt a beautiful character all day, but drop a speech bubble on top and you still have an illustration with text on it, not a page from a comic. Manga needs a moment, a character framed for that moment, a line that belongs to them, and screentone and speed lines doing the emotional work.

So I spent a week putting Tsubaki.3 on PixAI through eight scenes, from a quiet rooftop betrayal to an all-out tavern brawl, to see how well you can create manga with AI right now. I grouped what I found by the questions I was really asking. Every prompt and score is below.

The pieces that make an image manga

Before the tests, the target. A few things separate a manga panel from a nice anime drawing. It shows a moment, not a pose, so something is happening in the frame. The framing supports that moment, a close-up for emotion or a wide shot for chaos. The speech bubble belongs to a specific character, with its tail pointing at whoever is talking. And the manga tools carry the mood, the screentone, the speed lines, the heavy ink blacks.

Every prompt below aims at those four things at once. That is the part a plain character generator cannot do, and the part that makes this hard.

How I set the tests up

The workflow is the same each time. You describe a scene, not just a character. I lead with what is happening, then define who is in the frame, then set the camera, then add a short line of dialogue with the speaker named, then call in the manga tools. Everything ran on Tsubaki.3, PixAI's newest model. If your prompts keep coming out flat, the PixAI prompt formula is a good starting point.

One note that applies to every scene below: I generated each prompt first on base Tsubaki.3 with default settings, no style and no LoRA, and that is the left image. Then I ran the exact same prompt again with one or more LoRAs added, for the right image. The prompt never changes between the two, only the LoRA does.

Question 1: Can it frame a single dramatic moment?

This is the friendliest case, one character and one line, and it is where the model is strongest.

The first scene was a lone mechanic kneeling beside a wrecked robot in a burning hangar, looking up in disbelief.

a dramatic black and white manga panel, a young mechanic girl with
grease-smeared cheeks and goggles pushed up into her wild hair, kneeling
beside a half-destroyed giant robot in a burning hangar, sparks and smoke
around her, clutching a wrench, looking up in disbelief at something
off-panel, debris frozen mid-air, heavy screentone, sharp speed lines,
dynamic low angle, a trembling speech bubble reading "...You're alive?",
clean manga lettering, high contrast, manga illustration

On the base model, with no help at all, it understood the assignment. Heavy blacks, real screentone, a mecha with weight, and the girl there with her goggles, wrench, and grease. It looks like a panel, not a character card, and the line came through spelled right and legible in the corner. Two misses: the hangar was more smoke than fire, and her face looked surprised rather than devastated. 8.5 out of 10 on the first try.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with LoRAs.
The second scene pushed the same idea into pure framing, two very different single-character panels.

a black and white manga action panel, a martial artist mid-leap throwing a
punch straight at the viewer, extreme foreshortening, radial speed lines
bursting from the fist, heavy screentone, dynamic diagonal composition, a
jagged shout bubble reading "HAAA!", manga illustration

a black and white manga close-up, a scarred old swordsman grinning slowly in
the shadows, one eye glinting through his messy hair, cracked screentone
texture, heavy ink blacks, ominous mood, a small sharp speech bubble reading
"Finally. A real one.", manga illustration

The first is a fist coming straight at you, extreme foreshortening, speed lines off the knuckles, a jagged "HAAA!". It lands the way an action page should. The second goes the other way, a scarred swordsman grinning in the shadows, heavy blacks, cracked screentone, one eye catching the light. "Finally. A real one." Quietly menacing. Both scored 9.5, and both lines spelled right. One character, one focus, one short line. This is Tsubaki.3 at its best.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style LoRA test 4

Question 2: Can it hold several characters in one frame?

Harder, because now the model has to keep separate identities from bleeding together and tail each bubble to the right speaker.

A two-character rooftop betrayal was the cleanest result of the set.

a black and white manga panel, two students on a rooftop at sunset, on the
left a tall girl holding out a folded note with a calm unreadable face, on
the right a shorter boy frozen with a shocked expression and a single sweat
drop, wind scattering cherry blossoms between them, the city far below, soft
screentone and delicate linework, a small speech bubble from the girl reading
"I already know.", clear manga lettering, balanced two-shot composition,
manga illustration

This came out at 9 out of 10. The calm girl on the left, the frozen boy on the right, distinct at a glance, nothing blurring together. The bubble landed between them and pointed at the girl. "I already know." A whole relationship in three words. The only real miss was the sunset, which came out almost white with sparse blossoms. A pass with the Manga Style LoRA nudged it to 9.2, sharper ink and a more deliberate look.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style LoRA.
Then I scaled the cast up. A three-character brawl was the hardest scene I threw at it.

a lively black and white manga panel, three young adventurers caught in the
middle of a chaotic tavern brawl: a determined girl in the center swinging a
wooden chair at an attacker off-panel, a terrified boy behind her ducking under
a flying mug with both hands over his head, and a smug older woman sitting
calmly at the table drinking tea while chaos erupts around her, overturned
chairs, flying mugs, scattered coins, smoke and motion lines, other patrons
scrambling in the background, exaggerated facial expressions, dynamic
overlapping poses, heavy screentone, bold ink blacks, energetic speed lines,
dramatic perspective, three speech bubbles: the girl shouting "Get down!", the
boy yelling "I'M TRYING!", and the older woman calmly saying "Quite noisy.",
clear manga lettering, each bubble clearly tailed to the correct speaker,
manga illustration

It held together. Flying mugs, overturned chairs, speed lines everywhere, and nothing melted into a blur. All three characters stayed distinct, and all three lines came through correctly, which is a real result in a frame this busy. The miss is precision: I asked for the girl to swing a chair at an off-panel attacker, and there is no chair anywhere. It got the feel of a brawl, not the exact choreography. The Manga Style LoRA sharpened the rendering and, more usefully, tightened the bubble-to-speaker matching. 9 on the base, 9.2 with the LoRA.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style LoRA test 7

A four-adventurer tavern argument scored the same 9.5 on composition, four distinct characters around a table packed with maps, mugs, coins, and lanterns, and three bubbles sized right with the knight getting the biggest one. Its text is a story for the dedicated section below, because that is where it stumbled.

a lively black and white manga panel, four adventurers arguing around a
torch-lit tavern table covered in maps, mugs, and coins: a big armored knight
slamming his fist on the table and shouting, a sly hooded rogue leaning back
with a smirk and boots on the table, a nervous young mage clutching a staff and
sweating, and a calm elf archer with crossed arms and closed eyes. Wooden
beams, hanging lanterns, and a crowd of blurred patrons in the background,
heavy screentone, detailed linework, dynamic composition. Three speech bubbles:
a large jagged bubble from the knight reading "We attack at dawn!", a small
smug bubble from the rogue reading "Or we don't.", and a tiny nervous bubble
from the mage reading "...guys?". Clear manga lettering, each bubble clearly
tailed to the correct speaker, readable group composition, manga illustration

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style LoRA test 5

The lesson across these three: as a multi-character AI comic generator, Tsubaki.3 keeps identities separate and staging believable even when the frame is packed. It gives up some exact choreography as the scene gets busier.

Question 3: Can it keep a character across a sequence?

One panel is one thing. A strip that has to hold the same face across several is the real test for consistent manga characters. So I asked for a 4-koma, four panels telling one joke.

a black and white 4-koma manga strip, four stacked panels with the same
deadpan girl throughout: panel 1 she confidently casts a summoning spell with
a glowing circle; panel 2 smoke everywhere, she looks hopeful; panel 3 a tiny
unimpressed cat sits in the circle staring at her; panel 4 she deadpans at the
reader while the cat licks its paw. Consistent character across all four
panels, screentone, clean panel borders, short dialogue and sound effects in
bubbles, manga illustration

The gag lands. She casts a spell, smoke fills the panel, a tiny unimpressed cat appears in the circle, and she deadpans at you. Four beats, one joke, no explanation needed. The girl stayed the same across all four panels, and so did the cat. That is the part that matters here, and it held. The Manga Style LoRA lifted the look to 9.5. The dialogue, though, is the sticking point, and it belongs in the next section.

Left: base Tsubaki.3. Right: with the Manga Style LoRA.

Question 4: Can it work in full color?

Manga is not always monochrome. Webtoons run in full color, so I gave it two color scenes.

The first was a soft vertical webtoon panel.

a full-color webtoon style vertical panel, soft digital coloring with clean
lineart and gentle cell shading, a girl with pastel lavender hair and freckles
sitting alone on the steps of a cozy cafe at golden hour, holding a warm drink
in both hands, string lights and potted plants around her, a sleepy orange cat
curled beside her, warm bokeh light, soft emotional atmosphere, gentle color
grading, a rounded speech bubble above her reading "Maybe today's okay.", clean
webtoon lettering, vertical phone-friendly composition, Korean webtoon aesthetic

It came out at 9.5. A lavender-haired girl outside a cozy cafe, sleepy cat, golden light, warm and clean and shaped for a phone. Exactly the webtoon look, and "Maybe today's okay." spelled right. A pass with the Manga Style and Clear Style LoRAs got cleaner and sharper, though the girl came in closer to the camera and lost some of the quiet, alone framing of the base.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style and Clear Style LoRAs.
The second was a full-color splash page, the big dramatic kind.

a dramatic full-color manga splash panel, a young swordsman standing alone on a
ruined bridge during a violent thunderstorm, his torn coat and hair whipping in
the wind, katana lowered at his side, rain pouring across the scene, lightning
illuminating a massive shadowy creature emerging from the mist behind him,
broken buildings and debris scattered across the river below, the swordsman
looking back over his shoulder with a determined expression, deep atmospheric
perspective, foreground rain streaks, dramatic lightning, rich but controlled
manga coloring, detailed linework, selective cel shading, strong contrast,
cinematic composition, a small speech bubble near him reading "So you finally
came.", clean manga lettering, full-color manga illustration

The base pass came in at 9.3. A swordsman on a ruined bridge in a storm, lightning behind him, a huge creature in the mist. Controlled color instead of blown-out anime, real depth, and "So you finally came." came through clean. The LoRA pass is a cautionary tale I will get to under LoRAs, because it is the clearest example of a good LoRA wrecking a brief.

Left base Tsubaki.3. Right with the Manga Style and Body Aesthetics LoRAs.
The takeaway: color is not an afterthought here. Both color scenes scored above 9, so this doubles as a full-color AI comic generator, not a black-and-white-only tool.

The real limit: AI manga text

Here is the pattern that ran under everything. The pictures were strong. The words were the weak point, and the failure is consistent enough to plan around.

Two scenes show it plainly. On the 4-koma, the joke and the character held, but the dialogue came out in Japanese, convincing squiggles in the wrong language, because I had not locked English. On the tavern argument, the knight's line was supposed to say "We attack at dawn!" What came out was "We atteck ot dawn!" Attack became atteck, and at became ot. I ran it three times, including with the Manga Style LoRA, and got the same error every time.

So for the AI speech bubble generator side of this, the rules are simple. Always specify English. Keep your lines short. Keep the words common. Long or unusual words trip it up, and you should plan to redo the text on another pass. Short, plain lines like "I already know." and "Finally. A real one." spelled right every time. That is where AI manga text stands right now, close on common phrases, unreliable on dense or rare words.

The LoRA that helped, and the ones that hurt

The other cross-cutting lesson: the right LoRA supports the brief, and the wrong one quietly overrides it.

The Manga Style LoRA was the good one. It sharpened every black-and-white scene, heavier ink, denser screentone, more deliberate lines, and it backed up the manga look instead of fighting it. Keep that one for manga.

The character LoRAs fought the prompt. On the mechanic panel, stacking Crystal Eyes, Body Aesthetics, and Anime Girl strengthened the ink but colored the eyes inside a black-and-white manga and turned my grease-covered mechanic into a glossy heroine.

On the color splash page, running Body Aesthetics alongside Manga Style handed me a woman when the prompt clearly asked for a young swordsman, a great-looking panel that missed the most basic word in the brief.

Clear Style was the exception, cleaner and sharper on the color webtoon and otherwise out of the way.

So match the LoRA to your goal. A manga LoRA for manga. Skip the eye and body LoRAs unless you want a pin-up rather than the character you described.

Keeping a character consistent

If you are building a series instead of one image, your character has to stay recognizable from panel to panel. The 4-koma showed the model can hold a face and hair four panels deep on its own.

For a recurring character across a longer story, feed it a reference image to anchor to. PixAI's Reference Pro guide covers that workflow, and the more panels you make, the more it counts.

Field notes

A few habits came out of the eight scenes. Describe the moment, not the outfit, and lead with the action. Keep dialogue short, since one line beats a paragraph. Name the speaker right in the prompt. Always specify English for the text. Give a camera angle when it matters, close-up, wide, or low.

Pick one or two manga tools instead of stacking all of them. Simplify when the frame gets crowded, because fewer elements come across cleaner. And expect to redo longer text on a second pass.

The verdict

So, does it make manga? Yes, and more convincingly than I expected. It thinks in panels, frames a moment well, holds a busy scene without coming apart, keeps a character consistent across a strip, and handles full color as easily as black and white.

That is a real AI manga panel generator, not an anime app with speech bubbles bolted on.

The limits are just as real. Long dialogue garbles, rare words come out wrong every time, and exact choreography goes loose in busy panels. The wrong LoRA will hand you a lovely image that ignores what you asked for. None of that stops you.

You plan around it, with short lines, the right LoRA, and simpler scenes when precision counts.

Making manga with AI was never about generating one pretty picture. It is about pulling a moment, a frame, a character, and a line together in a single shot, and Tsubaki.3 does that, flaws and all.

So instead of stitching panels together by hand, you can build the whole thing in one generation. Open Tsubaki.3 on PixAI and make a single panel of your own. You will learn more from that one attempt than from anything I could write here.

Character Reference AI, Tested: 14 Consistency Runs on Tsubaki.3

Naveed W — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:41:06 +0000

Anyone can make a great anime character now. Making the same one twice is the hard part.

Ten times, in fact. Each one as good as the last. That is what a reference workflow is for. It is the line between a cool sketch and a character you can build a story on.

Spoiler: it holds more than it drops. But the drops are specific, and you should know them going in.

I ran Tsubaki.3, PixAI's newest model, through fourteen reference tests. Seven followed one character through a full production pipeline. Seven went wider on purpose, into creatures, a vehicle, and whole environments. A character reference AI that only holds one face is not much use to most people. Call it a consistent anime character generator or an AI character reference generator. Same job either way: same subject, new scene.

Every test has the exact prompt and a straight read. Let's go.

What held and what broke

It keeps a character recognizable across new poses, outfits, expressions, and scenes.
It holds two different characters in one frame without mixing their features.
It carries creatures, vehicles, and full scenes through big changes too.
It will not copy a foreign art style onto an existing image. Build that style from scratch.
In a transform, it keeps the big picture and drops small details you do not restate.

How the reference workflow works

The setup is simple. Generate a base image. Set it as your base or reference from the side panel. Then ask for the same subject somewhere new. The model reads your first image as the source of truth and carries the important parts forward. A reference image AI is only as strong as that first picture, so make it a good one.

To make consistency measurable, I built a test character with clear anchors. Then I named them in every prompt.

an original anime character, a woman in her late twenties with medium-brown
skin, short silver undercut hair with the longer top swept to the left,
heterochromia with one amber eye and one pale grey eye, a thin diagonal scar
across the bridge of her nose, a small gold hoop in her left ear, wearing a
fitted dark teal flight jacket over a grey turtleneck with a worn leather
satchel strap across her chest, calm confident expression, neutral standing
pose, plain light grey background, clean anime illustration, full body

Her anchors: the silver undercut, the amber-and-grey eyes, the nose scar, the gold hoop. Those four are what I tracked.

Part One: one character through a full production

Test 1: the turnaround sheet

Using this exact character, create a professional animation model sheet
showing the same character in four views at the same height on one sheet:
front view, three-quarter view, side profile, and back view. Keep the face,
silver undercut hair, heterochromia, nose scar, gold hoop, flight jacket,
turtleneck, and satchel strap identical across all four views. Neutral A-pose,
plain grey background, clean consistent line work, model-sheet layout.

All four views come out at a consistent scale. You get a usable turnaround. The silver undercut holds across every angle, and the back view shows the shaved side cleanly, which is the hardest angle to get right. The satchel strap carries onto the back too. The hoop stays put.

Two small misses. The nose scar is faint to the point of nearly disappearing at this size. And panels two and three read as two similar near-profiles rather than a clear three-quarter and a true side view, so the second angle teaches you little. The left eye color shifts a touch too.

The reference (left), the four-view turnaround (right).

Test 2: the expression sheet

Using this exact character, create an expression sheet of six head-and-
shoulders portraits in a grid, same character throughout: neutral, wide joyful
laugh, furious anger, quiet grief holding back tears, startled shock, and a
smug half-smile. Keep the face structure, silver undercut, heterochromia, nose
scar, and gold hoop identical in every panel. Only the expression changes.
Plain background, consistent style.

The reference (left), the six-expression grid (right).
This one is built to expose drift. It found a real one.

Her face structure survives the full acting range, including the wide laugh and the shout. That is the harder half to pass. The gold hoop holds everywhere.

But the heterochromia fails in four of the six panels. Both eyes go pale in some, both go amber in others. Only the laugh panel keeps the true split. A single small color anchor is exactly what this model loses track of. If your character has one, plan to fix it by hand.

Test 3: wardrobe swaps

Using this exact character, show the same woman in four full-body outfits side
by side, keeping her face, silver undercut hair, heterochromia, nose scar, and
gold hoop identical throughout: one, casual streetwear; two, a formal evening
suit; three, heavy winter gear with a scarf; four, sci-fi combat armor. Same
height and neutral pose in each, plain background, consistent art style.

The reference (left), the four outfits (right).
The undercut, face shape, and hoop hold across all four outfits. Every figure reads at the same height and build. The armor panel does not secretly bulk her up or slim her down, which is the main failure this test is designed to catch.

The "formal evening suit" came back as a plain navy business suit. Minor prompt miss.

Test 4: film shot coverage

Using this exact character, create a four-panel film shot sequence of the same
character in one location, a rain-soaked neon alley at night, with consistent
wardrobe and one lighting logic throughout: panel one, wide establishing shot
of her standing in the alley; panel two, medium shot from the front; panel
three, tight close-up on her face; panel four, low-angle shot as she looks up.
Keep her face, silver undercut, heterochromia, nose scar, gold hoop, and flight
jacket identical across all shots. Cinematic anime style, consistent neon
lighting.

The reference (left), the four-shot sequence (right).

This is the strongest of the seven. The neon signage, the wet reflective ground, and the alley geometry carry through all four panels. The one-lighting-logic requirement is met, not approximated. The shot progression matches the brief exactly, with no shot-type substitutions.

Best part: the nose scar finally shows up clearly in the close-up. That settles the earlier tests. The model can render the scar. It just loses it whenever the face is small in the frame. The heterochromia reads as two distinct tones in the low-angle panel too. Scale was the limit, not capability.

Test 5: two characters in one frame

First I generated a second, clearly different character.

an original anime character, a lean man in his early thirties with warm beige
skin, chin-length messy black hair with a single blue streak, tired dark eyes,
light stubble, a faded geometric tattoo on the right side of his neck, wearing
a mustard field jacket over a white henley, relaxed skeptical expression,
neutral standing pose, plain light grey background, clean anime illustration,
full body

Then I fed both references into one shot.

Using these two exact characters, place them together in one composed shot:
the silver-haired woman and the black-haired man with the blue streak standing
back to back in a dim workshop, mid-conversation, both looking off in different
directions. Keep each character's face and features exactly as in their
references, the woman's silver undercut, heterochromia, and nose scar, the
man's blue streak, neck tattoo, and stubble. Consistent lighting, cinematic
anime style, both characters fully in frame.

This is the hardest test in the set. The question is whether the two identities stay distinct or bleed together.

They stay distinct. Different hair, different builds, different skin tones, no cross-contamination. You would never mistake one character's features for having drifted onto the other. That is the whole pass here.

Her anchors hold. His blue streak and stubble hold too. His jacket reads more olive than mustard, and the neck tattoo is faint. The "dim workshop" came out more moody than truly dark. The back-to-back staging is right.

Test 5 Two Characters in One Frame

Test 6: cross-format for production and merch

Using this exact character, render the same woman three ways while keeping her
identity identical, her silver undercut, heterochromia, nose scar, and gold
hoop: one, a black-and-white manga panel of her looking over her shoulder with
screentone shading; two, a cute chibi sticker of her giving a thumbs up; three,
a clean flat-color character line-art on white. Keep her recognizable as the
same character across all three formats.

The reference (left), the three formats (right).

This asks the most. The art style itself changes on top of everything else. She still reads as the same person across all three.

The manga panel nails real screentone, not generic shading. The chibi keeps its die-cut border and the exaggerated proportions. The line art is clean and flat as asked. The only real drift is the manga hair reading looser and more windswept than the tidy reference.

Test 7: reference plus pose

Using this exact character, redraw her in this specific pose: mid-stride
running forward, upper body twisted to look back over her shoulder, right arm
reaching behind her. Keep her face, silver undercut, heterochromia, nose scar,
gold hoop, flight jacket, and satchel identical to the reference. Dynamic anime
style, plain background, full body.

The reference (left), the running pose (right).

Drop her into a demanding action pose and she stays herself. Her face is angled toward the camera rather than in pure profile, so this gives one of the cleanest heterochromia confirmations in the series. Amber on one side, a cooler pale tone on the other. The undercut, hoop, jacket, and satchel all hold. The pose is accurate. Only the scar stays faint, consistent with the pattern.

Part Two: beyond characters

The reference workflow does not care whether the subject is a person. The next seven run it on a crew, a scene, a vehicle, a crowd, and two mythic creatures.

Test 8: a graffiti crew, and a style transform

four teenage friends hanging out on a graffiti-covered basketball court at
dusk, a tall boy spinning a ball, a girl with box braids sitting on the fence,
a short kid on a skateboard, a hoodie kid filming on a phone, sketchy urban
anime style, rough ink outlines, marker-textured coloring, visible construction
lines, spray-paint splatter, hand-drawn street-art energy, warm streetlight glow

The base is a good group shot. All four kids interact in one believable space instead of looking pasted together. The spray-paint tags read as part of the scene. The warm dusk glow lands. The one miss is the box braids, which came back as loose curls.

Then I asked the model to re-render it as a 90s anime screencap.

re-render the whole image as an authentic late-1990s TV anime screencap: flat
cel-shaded colors, hand-drawn linework with slight imperfections, chunky
highlights in the hair, muted faded-photograph palette, subtle 35mm film grain,
4:3 broadcast framing, warm nostalgic tone. Make it look like a real frame from
a 90s OVA.

Base graffiti crew (left), the attempted 90s re-render (right).

This is the plainest limitation in the whole review. The 90s look did not take. No flat cel shading, no line imperfections, no film grain, no 4:3 framing. Just a cleaner version of the model's own default style. I ran it twice and got the same result.

Tsubaki.3 will not be talked out of its house rendering by an instruction. Want a specific era or technique? Build it from scratch. Which is exactly what worked later in this batch.

Test 9: a painterly storybook scene

a lone red paper lantern glowing on the branch of an ancient snow-covered tree,
a small round fox curled asleep in the roots below, thick painterly storybook
illustration, visible brush strokes, soft gouache textures, warm lantern light
against cool blue snow, dreamy children's-book atmosphere, no people

This is the best texture result of the set, and it proves the point above. The painterly style was built in from the first pixel, so the brushwork shows up in the bark and the snow-laden branches. The light logic is real too. The lantern's warm glow falls on the snow and bark right beneath it while the rest stays cool blue.

Then the reference move, turning the page to dawn.

Using this exact scene, keep the same tree, the same red lantern, and the same
sleeping fox, but shift it to dawn: the snow now soft pink, the lantern flame
nearly out, the fox stretching awake, first light through the branches. Same
painterly storybook style and brushwork.

Base night scene (left), the dawn shift (right).

The tree, the lantern's position, the pink dawn snow, and the light shafts all carry over. The brushwork stays consistent between the two images. But two specific instructions did not happen. The lantern stayed at full glow instead of burning nearly out. The fox came back in an alert playing pose instead of a sleepy stretch. The model held the scene but ignored the state changes inside it.

Test 10: a hyper-glossy vehicle

a candy-colored futuristic hover-scooter parked on a clean white studio floor,
hyper-glossy hybrid 2D-3D render, smooth cel-shaded surfaces with volumetric 3D
form, glossy reflective paint, soft rim lighting, pastel mint and coral palette,
floating holographic price tag, high-end product-shot aesthetic, toy-like and
premium

The style here is the cleanest technical match in the whole run. The surfaces have cel-shaded banding but real dimensional form. The glossy reflections read as true specular highlights rather than painted-on streaks. The mint-and-coral palette and the product-shot framing are spot on. The only miss is the word "hover." It rests on wheels, grounded.

Then into motion.

Keep this exact hover-scooter identical, same shape, same mint and coral glossy
paint, same details, but place it now mid-drift through a neon night city
street, motion blur, light trails, reflections of signs on its glossy surface,
same hyper-glossy hybrid 3D style.

Base studio shot (left), the neon night drift (right).

Object consistency is perfect. Same shape, same paint, same details. The transform even fixes the earlier miss: tilted and blurred with no ground contact, it now reads as airborne. Neon signs smear across its glossy panels exactly as asked. One unrequested extra: a blurred human silhouette in the corner that nobody asked for.

Test 11: a desaturated crowd scene

a crowded rain-soaked train platform at night, dozens of anime commuters with
umbrellas, one still figure standing motionless in the flowing crowd,
desaturated cinematic anime style, muted grey-blue palette, single warm sodium
lamp as the only color, heavy rain, shallow depth of field, film-still framing,
melancholic mood

This is the model's best literal read of a color-and-mood brief. The whole frame is cool grey-blue except the one warm lamp, exactly as specified. The crowd is dense and real. The depth of field falls off properly. The still figure stands out because her umbrella is down while everyone else's is up. Stillness shown through an action, not just position.

Then the camera move.

Using this exact scene, keep the same crowd, the same still figure, the same
rain and desaturated palette, but change to a low tracking shot from behind the
still figure looking out at the departing train, wet reflections on the
platform, same cinematic desaturated grade.

Base crowd shot (left), the tracking shot from behind (right).

The camera reposition works. The wet platform reflections are excellent. But this one drops the "keep the same" parts. The crowd thins from dozens of people to about four. The warm-lamp accent that made the original distinctive is gone, leaving everything uniformly cool. The scene held its mood but lost the specific elements that defined it.

Test 12: a neo-cyberpunk market

a dense neon night market in a neo-cyberpunk megacity, narrow alley packed with
holographic food stalls, steam and smoke, hanging cables and glowing signs in
Japanese and Korean, mixed crowd of cybernetic vendors and shoppers, reflective
wet ground, teal and magenta neon, chromatic aberration, blade-runner anime
atmosphere, deep perspective

The environment is excellent. The dense alley, the hanging cables, the steam, the mixed signage, the wet neon reflections, and the deep perspective all land. The market feels packed without turning to chaos. The one weak spot is the people. The crowd works at a scene level, but individual faces are soft and a little distorted. The model renders the place far better than the people filling it.

Then a shift in hour and weather.

Keep this exact market identical, same stalls, same signs, same layout and
perspective, but shift it to a quiet pre-dawn: most signs off, one lit noodle
stall, a lone street cleaner, fog rolling through, cool blue palette with a
single warm stall glow, same neo-cyberpunk style.

Base night market (left), the pre-dawn version (right).

The pre-dawn mood is strong. Cool blue, heavy fog, one warm noodle stall, a lone cleaner. But "keep this exact market" only half holds. The layout and stalls carry over while the detailed signs turn into blank panels. Same lesson as the crowd scene. The model keeps the shape of a place but not its fine print.

Test 13: a retro 90s mecha

a battered military mecha kneeling in a wheat field at golden hour, one arm
damaged and smoking, birds scattering, distant mountains, authentic late-1990s
OVA anime style, flat cel-shaded colors, hand-painted background, heavy line
weight, muted faded palette, 35mm film grain, 4:3 framing, nostalgic
broadcast-still look

Built from scratch, the retro look lands far better than it did as a transform in Test 8. The heavy outlines, the muted military palette, and the film-like texture give a convincing retro feel, though it leans modern-retro rather than a true 90s cel frame. The mecha, wheat field, mountains, and golden hour are all there. A miss: the damage reads more like burning debris than subtle smoke.

Then the hero shot.

Keep this exact mecha identical, same battle damage, same design and faded 90s
palette, but pull back to a dramatic wide low-angle hero shot as it slowly rises
to standing against a burning orange sunset sky, dust and embers, same 90s
cel-animation OVA style and film grain.

IBase kneeling mecha (left), the rising hero shot (right).

A strong transform. The exact mecha design, palette, and battle damage carry straight over. The move from kneeling to a low-angle standing shot makes it imposing. The sunset, embers, and smoke land well. The rendering is a touch more refined than a real 90s frame, but the identity and the drama both hold.

Test 14: an ukiyo-e koi-dragon

a great white koi transforming into a dragon as it leaps up a roaring waterfall,
traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock style fused with modern anime color, bold
flat outlines, wave patterns like Hokusai, gold-leaf accents, indigo and
vermilion palette, visible paper texture, mythic and elegant, no people

This is the strongest single result in the whole set. The woodblock influence is unmistakable. Flat color, decorative wave patterns, gold cloud accents, paper-like texture. The creature reads clearly as a koi mid-transformation, scales and fins alongside a dragon head and horns. The palette and composition are excellent. The only nitpick: it looks more like a dragon emerging than the exact instant of change.

Then the final transformation.

Using this exact koi-dragon, keep the same design, palette, and woodblock-anime
style, but show the final moment of its transformation at the top of the falls,
now a full serpentine dragon coiling into storm clouds, lightning, same ukiyo-e
woodblock fusion and gold-leaf accents.

Base koi-dragon at the falls (left), the final storm-cloud form (right).

The reference move is clean. The same design, mane, horns, and palette carry over. The subject coils up into storm clouds with lightning drawing the eye, a strong vertical composition. The one honest limit: the creature keeps its koi head and fins, so it lands between a koi-dragon and a fully serpentine one rather than completing the change. And the rendering drifts a little more cinematic than strict woodblock.

The pattern across all fourteen

Across all fourteen, the model is good at one thing in particular. Give it a subject and ask for it again somewhere new, and it holds. A new pose. A new angle. A different time of day. A change in weather. It kept two separate characters in one frame without mixing their faces. That is the main thing you want from a consistent character AI, and it does it.

The weak spots are clear too. It will not copy a different art style onto an image you already made. It falls back to its own look every time. It drops fine facial detail when the face is small, then draws it correctly once you move in close. And in a transform it keeps the overall scene but loses the small things you do not mention again. A sign goes blank. A crowd thins out. A lamp you asked to dim stays lit. Name those things and they stay.

How to get consistent results

The whole review turns into a short set of habits.

Start with a clean, well-lit reference facing forward. Every later image inherits it.
Name the details that define your character, the exact hair, eyes, and signature items.
Check consistency in close and medium shots, where fine detail shows up.
For a specific art style, build it from scratch instead of converting an existing image.
When you change one thing, list everything you want kept, not just the thing you are changing.
Use it for more than faces. It holds objects, creatures, and scenes just as well.

PixAI's Reference Pro guide covers the reference workflow in full. And once you have a character you want to reuse, training a character LoRA on PixAI turns it into a model you can call up any time, so you are not re-uploading a reference for every image.

Your next step

For keeping a character consistent across poses, outfits, expressions, scenes, and shots with a second character, Tsubaki.3 does the job. It works as an OC character generator and a scene tool in the same breath. Its limits are small and easy to work around once you know them.

The way to know if it fits your work is to test it. Take your own character, run it through a few scenes on PixAI, and see what holds. You will know in about three images.

I Ran 8 Edits Through an AI Anime Image Editor. Here Is Every Prompt and Result.

Naveed W — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:31:29 +0000

Most AI art writing is about generation. This is about the reverse move: taking an image you already have and changing one thing without wrecking the rest. That is what it means to edit anime images with AI, and it is harder than it sounds, because the model has to decide what to touch and, more importantly, what to leave alone.

To see how far it has come, I ran eight edits through PixAI's newly released Tsubaki.3 model across eight image types: a character on a street, an empty room, an event poster, a three-panel manga, black-and-white line art, a photographic-style portrait, a six-panel comic, and a classic shounen action scene. Some were easy. Some I made hard on purpose. For every test you get the exact prompts, base and edit, so you can reproduce them.

Why edit instead of regenerate

When an image is almost right, most people generate again and hope the one wrong detail fixes itself. The problem is that every fresh generation redraws the whole picture.

You finally get the jacket color right, and now the face is different, the pose changed, and the mood you liked is gone.

Editing runs the other way. You hand the model the picture you already have and tell it to change only the wrong part and leave everything else alone.

That makes it the better call when most of the image is already good, when you want a small variation of the same scene, or when you need to fix an object or some text without rebuilding everything.

So the real test for any AI anime image editor is not only whether it makes the change you asked for. It is whether it leaves everything else untouched.

How editing works in Tsubaki.3

You start from an image instead of a blank prompt. Generate or open the picture, click the edit icon, pick the model, describe the change in plain language, and generate.

There is also a dedicated editor if you prefer a full canvas.

The one habit that carried every test was naming two things in each instruction: what should change, and what should stay. The "keep this the same" half is not filler. It is the fence that stops the model from redrawing a face when all you asked for was a new jacket.

Test 1: Relight a scene, keep the character

The change most people want first: shift the whole mood while the character stays herself. This is the hardest kind of preservation, because almost everything in the frame moves.

BASE
an anime girl with shoulder-length teal hair in a high ponytail, round
glasses, wearing a mustard-yellow cardigan over a white blouse, making a
peace sign with her right hand, holding a paper coffee cup in her left hand,
standing on a sunny city street, a small cafe chalkboard sign beside her,
bright afternoon light, anime illustration

EDIT
Change the scene to a rainy evening with wet streets and warm streetlights,
keep the character, her outfit, pose, glasses, and expression the same.

The cafe girl at midday (base left) and after the rainy-evening edit (edit right)

This is about as well as an anime background changer can do. Bright afternoon turned into a wet, glowing night with reflective streets and rain, and she came through unchanged: the teal ponytail, the glasses, the mustard cardigan, the peace sign, even the coffee cup. Framing shifted a little and a few background details moved, but her identity held completely under a total lighting change.

Test 2: Add an object to a detailed scene

Editing is not only for characters. Often the change is an object, and dropping one in beats rebuilding a whole scene. The test is whether the rest of the room survives.

BASE
a cozy cafe interior in late afternoon, empty, worn wooden tables and
mismatched chairs, a glass pastry case catching warm window light, chalk
menu board on brick wall, hanging pendant lamps, potted plants on floating
shelves, a coffee machine with steam, soft golden light from a large
street-facing window, no people, detailed anime background illustration

EDIT
Add a sleeping orange tabby cat curled up on the windowsill, lit by the same
warm window light, keep the tables, pastry case, menu board, lamps, plants,
and all other details exactly the same.

The empty cafe (base left) and after adding the cat (edit right)

I built the base with plenty of surfaces to disturb: wood, brick, glass, metal. The edit handled it. The cat landed on the sill, curled and catching the warm light so it read as part of the scene rather than pasted on, and the tables, pastry case, brickwork, menu board, lamps, and plants stayed put. This is where an AI image editor for anime is at its most useful: one new object added, everything else left standing. The same approach covers when you need to replace an object in an image AI-side rather than add one.

Test 3: Replace text on a poster

Text is where editing gets harder, and I want to be straight about it. AI models still struggle with small or dense text, so a text edit doubles as a limitations test.

BASE
an anime-style summer festival key visual, a girl in a red yukata seen from
behind watching fireworks over a river, festival stalls with lanterns below,
large stylized title "SUMMER FEST" across the top, a subtitle "August 15 -
17" beneath it, a small ticket-price line and a logo badge in the bottom
corner, clean graphic poster layout, anime illustration

EDIT
Replace the main title "SUMMER FEST" with "NIGHT MARKET FESTIVAL". Keep the
new title clearly readable and properly fitted within the original title
area. Preserve the subtitle "August 15 - 17", ticket-price line, logo badge,
all three characters, their clothing, poses and positions, the fireworks,
river, festival stalls, lanterns, reflections, colors, lighting, and overall
poster composition exactly as they are. Do not move, redraw, remove, or alter
any other element.

The poster before (base left) and after (edit right)

The title swap came out well. The longer replacement fit the original title area without overlapping the subtitle or getting cut off, and it stayed readable, which is not a given when a title gets longer. The subtitle, the girl, the fireworks, and the layout all held.

My prompt happens to name three characters, but this poster has one, so she was the only figure to keep. The miss is the small print: the tiny ticket-price line was garbled in the original and stayed garbled after. To edit text in an AI image works for headlines and short lines, but do not expect it to fix tiny type.

Test 4: Edit a single manga panel

A manga page is one image made of several panels, so changing one panel without touching the others is a real preservation test.

BASE
a black and white manga page with three panels and clean gutters, top panel
a wide establishing shot of a rainy school rooftop, middle panel a medium
shot of a short-haired girl gripping the wet railing and looking down, bottom
panel a close-up of her face with a single tear, screentone shading, speed
lines in the middle panel, one empty speech bubble in the top panel, manga
illustration

EDIT
In the bottom close-up panel only, change her expression from a tear to a
small confident smile. Also add the text "I'll tell him tomorrow." inside the
empty speech bubble in the top panel. Keep the other panels, the page layout,
the screentone, the speed lines, and the gutters exactly the same.

The manga page before (base left) and after (edit right)
Both changes landed in the right spots. The tear became a natural, confident smile, and the empty bubble filled with clean, readable dialogue. The three-panel layout, the gutters, the rooftop, the middle panel, the rain, the screentone, and the speed lines all held, and the middle panel was correctly left alone.

The one honest note: the edited panel's face rendered slightly differently beyond the mouth, so it is the same character and framing, just not pixel-identical. The short bubble text came out clean here, the opposite of the tiny poster print, because larger, simpler text is easier to place.

Test 5: Color line art and add a background

This moves an image from one production stage to the next, bare line art to a colored scene. The test is line fidelity: does it color inside the drawing, or quietly redraw it.

BASE
clean black and white anime line art on a white background, no color, no
shading, a girl with long braided hair wearing a hooded traveler's cloak and
holding a lantern, detailed confident linework, full body, character concept
line art

EDIT
Add flat anime color to this exact line art: teal hair, a deep red cloak,
brown boots, and a brass lantern with a warm golden glow. Keep the
character's linework, pose, proportions, facial features, clothing design,
and composition completely unchanged. Do not redraw, reshape, or restyle the
character. Expand the scene by adding a detailed fantasy background around the
character: a narrow forest path beneath tall trees, moss-covered rocks, small
bushes and ferns along the path, a few distant mountain silhouettes, and
subtle atmospheric mist. Add soft moonlight filtering through the trees and
let the lantern cast a warm glow onto the nearby ground, rocks, and lower part
of the cloak. Include a small wooden signpost and a few scattered leaves near
the path. Keep the new background visually secondary to the character. Do not
overlap, cover, or modify the existing character line art. Preserve the
original full-body framing and proportions, and use clean flat anime colors
throughout with simple controlled lighting and no painterly rendering.

The line art (base left) and the colored version (edit right)

This is where the limits showed. The hard part, the background, came out better than I expected: a misty forest path with rocks, ferns, a signpost, and a warm lantern glow. But it went past what I asked for on style. Instead of the flat colors I specified, it added shading, atmospheric light, and a painterly finish, and the cloak and proportions drifted a little from the original lines. It colored and rendered the piece rather than flat-filling it. If you need to preserve an exact production stage, plan around that.

Test 6: Relight a portrait and add a second character

The most complex edit so far: a full relight, a new person, new objects, and the original subject kept exactly. The base needs flagging first, because it revealed a real limitation.

BASE
a photorealistic portrait of a young woman standing by a large rain-streaked
window, soft overcast daylight, shallow depth of field, fine film grain,
realistic skin and hair texture, muted natural color grade, photographic

I asked for a photorealistic portrait, and this is the one place the model plainly missed. Despite the prompt, Tsubaki.3 returned an anime-style illustration with stylized features rather than real skin and film grain. The rainy window and soft light were right, but the core photographic requirement was not met. Useful to know going in: asking this model for a true photo is not its strength.

EDIT
Relight this image to a warm golden-hour sunset streaming through the
rain-streaked window, with soft orange sunlight, natural highlights, gentle
shadows, and a subtle lens flare. Increase the shallow depth of field so the
background falls softly out of focus. Add a second young woman standing near
the window in the background, slightly behind and to the right of the original
woman. Give her shoulder-length brown hair and a simple cream-colored sweater,
with a natural relaxed expression as she looks toward the window. Expand the
environment with a small wooden table beside the window, a ceramic coffee cup
on the table, a few books, a potted green plant, and a warm table lamp. Keep
the rain visible on the window and add subtle reflections of the sunset and
interior objects in the glass. Most importantly, keep the original woman
exactly the same. Preserve her face, eyes, hair, pose, hands, clothing,
proportions, and position. Do not redraw, reshape, replace, or restyle her. Do
not alter her expression or identity. The newly added character and objects
must fit naturally into the existing scene without covering or modifying the
original subject.

The portrait before (base left) and after the relight and added character (edit right)

The edit itself was strong, which makes for an odd but honest split. The golden-hour relight worked: warm sunlight through the window, a visible lens flare, stronger depth separation, and convincing reflections on the wet glass. It added the second woman and the table, cup, books, plant, and lamp without crowding the frame, and blurred the new character correctly to match the shallow depth of field.

The original woman stayed recognizable, her face, hair, pose, and position held. The caveat: the strong warm light re-rendered her skin, hair, and clothing, and her fine facial details came out softer than in the original. A big, multi-part edit largely worked, even though the base it started from had missed its own brief.

Test 7: Change one detail across a six-panel comic

The most demanding preservation test. I generated a full six-panel story, then asked to change one small character detail across the entire page, which means the edit has to hold in six drawings of the same person at once.

BASE
Create a polished Japanese anime manga page consisting of 6 sequential panels
telling one coherent short story.
Main character: a 17-year-old Japanese high school girl with short dark-blue
bobbed hair, straight bangs, amber eyes, a small beauty mark beneath her left
eye, and a distinctive red ribbon tied around her school uniform collar. Keep
her facial features, hairstyle, body proportions, uniform design, and red
ribbon exactly consistent across every panel.
Story: On her way home after school, she notices a small abandoned kitten
hiding beneath a vending machine during a sudden evening rain. She initially
hesitates, then kneels down, reaches toward the kitten, shields it from the
rain with her school bag, and finally smiles as the kitten approaches her.
Panel 1: Wide establishing shot of a Japanese residential street after school,
dark clouds gathering, the girl walking alone with her school bag.
Panel 2: Medium shot as she notices the kitten beneath a vending machine,
surprised expression.
Panel 3: Close-up of her face looking concerned, followed by a detailed view
of the frightened kitten.
Panel 4: Dramatic low-angle shot as heavy rain begins, with the girl kneeling
and extending one hand toward the kitten.
Panel 5: Dynamic composition showing her using her school bag to shelter the
kitten from the rain, with strong diagonal rain lines and dramatic lighting.
Panel 6: Warm emotional close-up as the kitten finally approaches her hand and
she smiles.
Use varied camera angles and shot sizes across the page. Use high-quality
Japanese manga aesthetics: clean expressive anime linework, detailed character
rendering, screentone shading, speed lines where appropriate, cinematic
lighting, strong panel composition. Add natural Japanese dialogue and sound
effects in the speech bubbles, legible and correctly integrated, short and
natural rather than excessive.

EDIT
Change the character's red ribbon to blue in all six panels. Keep her face,
hair, uniform, the kitten, the panel layout, the rain, the backgrounds, the
Japanese text, and the manga style exactly the same.

The six-panel page before (base left) and after the ribbon edit (edit right)

This was the standout. The ribbon turned blue in every one of the six panels, and her identity, the panel layout, the rain, the backgrounds, and the manga style all held. Changing one character detail consistently across six separate drawings is a hard consistency test, and it passed with only very minor differences in facial linework between versions.

The weakness was in the original generation rather than the edit: some Japanese dialogue and sound effects read as unnatural, the same small-text problem from the poster.

Test 8: Rebuild a fight scene around an unchanged character

The hardest of all: keep a character identical while replacing the entire scene and adding a second character mid-action. I started with a classic shounen warrior on a cliff at sunrise.

BASE
A young anime warrior standing on a cliff edge at sunrise, spiky black hair
with sharp defined strands catching orange light, determined narrow eyes with
sharp highlight points, wearing a torn orange and blue gi with a red sash,
scar across one cheek, fists clenched, wind blowing his clothes and hair to
one side, small energy aura beginning to flicker faintly around his shoulders.
Background: a rocky mountain cliff overlooking a valley shrouded in morning
mist, distant peaks against a fiery orange-to-yellow gradient sky, a few birds,
sparse windswept pine trees. Style: classic shounen anime, bold clean
linework, flat cel-shading with hard-edged shadows, vibrant saturated colors,
dramatic sunrise lighting with strong rim light, sharp facial features
reminiscent of 90s-2000s Toei animation.

EDIT
Keep the same character exactly as generated: same face, same spiky black
hair, same sharp eyes, same scar across the cheek, same torn orange and blue
gi with red sash, but transform the scene entirely. Transplant the character
into a mid-air battle stance against a new villain: a tall armored antagonist
with pale white skin, long silver hair whipping violently, glowing violet
eyes, a cracked black and crimson breastplate with jagged shoulder spikes, one
clawed hand raised and crackling with dark purple energy, a torn cape, cold
sneering expression. Both are locked in a clash mid-motion: the hero's fist
connects with a shockwave of golden energy against the villain's clawed hand,
impact distortion rippling outward, clothes and hair whipped by the collision,
debris frozen mid-air. Environment: replace the sunrise cliff with a
collapsing ancient stone temple ruin at night, shattered pillars cracking
apart in the air, glowing blue runic energy from fractures in the floor, a
massive cracked moon low behind the ruins, storm clouds and lightning, embers
drifting. Style: same classic shounen cel-shaded look, bold linework, flat
shading, high saturation, shifted to a high-contrast night battle: deep blues
and purples, gold and violet energy, dramatic uplighting, motion blur on both
characters' outer limbs.

The shounen hero (base left) and after the fight-scene transformation (edit right)

The base nailed the shounen look: bold linework, flat cel-shading, spiky hair with rim light, the torn gi, though the energy aura came out softer than the flickering effect I asked for. The edit is the impressive part. The hero's face, hair, scar, and gi held intact while the whole scene changed to a collapsing night temple with a fully detailed villain mid-clash, floating debris, and a golden-versus-violet energy impact. Locking identity through a total scene swap is the hardest thing an edit can do, and it held. Only the motion blur was subtler than I wanted, so the impact reads a touch soft.

One honest flag, unrelated to model quality: the hero design lands very close to an instantly recognizable existing character rather than an original one. That is fine for personal testing, but it is a copyright and platform risk if the image goes public, and the edit only doubles down on it. Prompt for a famous style and this is the trade you make.

Instruction editing vs inpainting

Everything above is instruction-based editing: you describe the change in words and the model works out where to apply it.

The older approach is good to know too. Inpainting has you manually mask the exact area you want changed and regenerate only that patch. Neither wins across the board. Instruction editing is faster, reads naturally, and handles whole-scene changes like the Test 1 relight that would be awkward to mask by hand.

Inpainting still wins when you need tight local control over one small region and do not want the model deciding the edges. The inpainting and outpainting guide covers that route, and AI inpainting for anime remains a solid choice for pinpoint fixes.

What I would tell you before you start

None of these lessons are complicated, and they all came out of the eight tests. Name what should change and what should stay in the same instruction, because the "keep this the same" half protects the parts you like. Change one thing at a time, since stacking several edits into one prompt is where results get messy.

Be specific about clothing, objects, gestures, and expressions. If you want to change a pose in an image AI-side, the same rule holds: name the new pose and lock the rest.

Expect small or dense text to stay rough, and lean on edits for headlines, not fine print. And always compare the result against the original, because the change you did not ask for is the easy one to miss.

The takeaway

Editing is the tool for when you already have an anime image you want to keep. Instead of regenerating and gambling the whole picture, you change the one wrong part and leave the rest standing, which keeps the version you worked for and costs far less.

Across these eight tests Tsubaki.3 did that well more often than not: relighting a scene, adding an object, swapping a title, editing one manga panel, coloring line art, relighting a portrait and adding a character, changing a detail across a whole comic, and rebuilding a fight scene, all while holding the surrounding image steady.

It is not perfect. Small text stays rough, a strict style instruction can drift, a heavy relight softens fine detail, and it would not give me a real photo when I asked. But for targeted changes to characters, objects, text, and backgrounds, it does the job editing is supposed to do. If you have an image that is almost right, try editing it on PixAI instead of starting over.

How to Get Ideas for AI Art: A Method for Going From Seed to Prompt

Naveed W — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:30:42 +0000

Prompt syntax is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what to make. You can know every tag and every formula and still open the generator with nothing in your head.

The tool solves how to make the art. It does not solve what to make. It will not decide the subject, the setting, the mood, the story moment, or the look. That decision is yours, and it is where most people stall out. So this is less a prompt guide and more a method for AI art inspiration: how to turn a vague seed into a concept, using PixAI's creative agent, Mio.2.

I ran a real example through it for this post, including the point where the agent's reasoning and the model's output disagreed. Here is the method, then the run.

The method in one line

The whole thing is: seed → find the missing piece → build a concept in conversation → split into a few directions → generate → adjust the decision that missed. The generating is the last and easiest step.

Step 1: Name the missing piece

When an idea feels too thin to make, it is usually short one part, not all of them. A concept that holds up has a subject, a setting, a mood, a focus, a story moment, and a look. Stuck ideas carry two or three of those and a hole where the rest should be.

Before you touch the generator, look at your seed and ask which part is missing. Once you can name it, you know what to go find. This is the single most useful habit for beating creative block with AI.

Step 2: Read threads, not galleries

A finished gallery image hides every choice that produced it, so it is a weak source of AI prompt ideas. A creative thread shows those choices instead.

Mio.2's home feed is a stream of image-and-text threads from the AI art community. A thread exposes the reasoning: the starting idea, how it grew, how the words map to the picture, and the follow-ups the creator tried. You are watching a decision get made.

When you scroll, do not hunt for an image to copy. Look for one borrowable decision: a light direction, a palette, a framing trick for a quiet moment.

Step 3: Reduce inspiration to reusable elements

Go from "I like this" to "I can use this part." A whole concept belongs to its author. A single element does not.

Take the piece apart: theme, mood, color, the character's role, the setting, the composition, the story it hints at. Pull the one or two parts that fit where your idea is thin, then combine them with your own interest. You might keep a creator's low warm light and drop it onto a completely different subject.

The inspiration-versus-copying test is one question: did you transform it? If the result still reads as their work repainted, you copied. If you took a mood or a lighting idea and built your own subject and story on it, that is character design inspiration doing its job. Keep the decision, drop the identity.

The worked example

I started stuck on purpose. Mio.2 was set to its Ideation persona, which brainstorms with no image generation, on the default model, Momoka v1.

The seed:

I want to make something with an old train, maybe a station, a summer
evening feeling. I can't decide if it should be about the place or about
a person. Help me figure that out before we settle on anything.

The agent did not return a prompt. It reframed the either-or into a spectrum and offered three ways to lean: the station as the star, a person as the focus, or equal weight with a small figure in a big quiet space. My question assumed I had to pick place or person, and it flagged that the choice itself was the wrong shape.

I pushed back rather than accept the menu. I asked which option carried the loneliness with the fewest elements, and told it to lock the mood first: exact time, light, and one detail that sells the nostalgia. Its reasoning was sound.

An empty station reads as peaceful, not lonely. A close character costs a lot of description. A small distant figure in a large empty space carries the feeling by scale for almost nothing.

Then it committed: 6:50 PM in mid-August, minutes before sunset, low honey-amber light with long shadows, and a single moth circling a ceiling lamp just switched on. That moth is a detail I would not have added, and it is the thing that makes an image feel authored instead of assembled.

Split into directions

One good seed should produce several concepts. I asked Mio.2 to set the story moment, then split the idea into three versions sharing the same 6:50 light.

It fixed the story first: she is arriving, she expected someone at 6:50, and they have not come. It carried the moth through all three, and held a wilted lily back for the closest version only, reasoning that once you see the lily, the trick is over.

Here are the three prompts it wrote. Same world, three distances from the feeling.

A, the empty scene with no figure:

A wide, still establishing shot of an old rural train station at 6:50 PM on
a mid-August evening, a few minutes before sunset. The low honey-amber sun
just kisses the edge of the platform roof, casting long soft-edged shadows
from weathered iron pillars across wooden planks. Air thick with humid summer
haze, pollen suspended in the warmth. A single moth circles a ceiling lamp
just switched on, its filament still faintly pink before settling into yellow.
A faded hand-painted station nameplate on the wall. A weathered wooden bench,
unused. The heavy stillness of a place that usually hums with movement. No
people anywhere. Cinematic, painterly, nostalgic.

B, the small distant figure:

A wide shot down the length of an old rural train station at 6:50 PM on a
mid-August evening, a few minutes before sunset. Honey-amber sunlight cuts low
and horizontal across weathered wooden platform planks, casting long soft
shadows from iron pillars. A single moth circles a ceiling lamp just switched
on in the middle distance, its filament a faint pink-orange glow. Far down the
platform, almost lost in the frame's vastness, a young woman in a pale summer
dress sits alone on a wooden bench beside a small vintage suitcase. Seen from
behind in slight quarter profile, her posture entirely still, the stillness of
someone who has been waiting past the appointed hour. Humid summer air carries
pollen through the warm light. The empty station gently swallows her.
Architecture dominates; the figure occupies only a quiet fifth of the frame.
A sense of arrival with no one to meet. Cinematic, painterly, nostalgic.

C, the closer character shot:

A medium shot at a quiet old rural train station at 6:50 PM on a mid-August
evening, a few minutes before sunset. Honey-amber sunlight falls low and
horizontal, catching a young woman seated on a weathered wooden bench in a pale
summer dress, dark hair loose against her shoulders. A small vintage suitcase
rests beside her. In her lap she holds loosely a single white lily, its stem
already slightly wilted from the August heat. Her gaze rests on train tracks
curving out of frame, her expression the particular stillness of someone who
has waited past the appointed hour and is only beginning to understand no one
is coming, not crying, not smiling, just suspended. Behind her, slightly out of
focus, a moth circles a newly-lit ceiling lamp, its filament faintly pink. Long
shadows from iron pillars stretch across the platform. Humid haze and pollen in
the warm light. The belonging that did not arrive. Cinematic, painterly, nostalgic.

That spread let me test the same feeling three ways before spending anything on generation.

Generation, and what it taught about the model

The prompts are records of decisions we already made, so a miss points straight at the decision to adjust. I switched to the default image-generating persona and ran B first.

It came out nice, and it missed in a useful way. I asked for a tiny figure lost in a vast station, and the model pulled her into a medium shot, closer and more central than the prompt asked. The light and mood were right and the moth was there, but the loneliness-by-scale idea did not survive.

Then C, the closer version with the lily.

This one landed. The waiting-past-the-hour look reads on her face, the wilted lily does its quiet job, and the moth-lit lamp glows behind her. C followed its prompt more closely than B, which points at something useful to know about model behavior: emotion on a face is easier for the model to land than emotion carried by distance and empty space.

For completeness I ran A, the empty scene. It came out warm and calm, and it settled the opening question. An empty station reads as peaceful, not lonely. Mio.2 predicted exactly that during ideation, and the three images together proved it.

The whole run, three generations plus the brainstorming, cost about 180,000 gift gems on Momoka v1. Net read: the agent moved me from a stuck seed to three directions fast and reasoned toward the scale idea the generator resisted. Agent leaned one way, model leaned another, and I made the final call.

Keep the thread, share the process

The full path from seed to concept to prompt lives in one thread, so you can publish it and share the reasoning instead of only the result. That helps another stuck creator far more than a finished image. I published the train station run end to end. Here is the thread.

Wrap-up

Creative block breaks the same way each time: build the direction before you write the final prompt, rather than expecting the prompt to invent one. Read threads for a decision to borrow, reduce what you like to reusable parts, and talk a vague idea into a subject, a mood, a moment, and a look.

The Mio.2 getting-started guide covers the basics, and my free library of over 1,000 anime prompt ideas is a solid source of seeds, anime character ideas, and anime prompt inspiration. When you have a thought you cannot shape yet, take it to Mio.2 and talk it out.

Animate an Anime Image with AI: The Image-to-Video Workflow, Step by Step

Naveed W — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:39:33 +0000

If you want to animate an anime image with AI, the mental model matters more than any single setting. Text-to-video asks the model to build a whole scene from a sentence. An anime image to video AI run does the opposite: it starts from a fixed frame you already made, and your job is to describe what changes inside it.

That inversion is the reason character consistency stops being the hard part. The face already exists on screen. So instead of fighting drift, you spend your effort on a narrower and more controllable question: what moves, how much, and what stays locked.

I ran a real image to animation AI test through PixAI for this post, from a still portrait to a five second clip, including the overloaded first attempt and the fix. Here is the full workflow, then the case study.

The workflow at a glance

Every clip follows the same shape, regardless of how ambitious you get:

Pick a source image that suits movement.
Decide what should move and what stays put.
Choose subtle motion or a larger scene change.
Feed the image into the video step.
Describe the motion clearly.
Generate, review, and revise when the result is off.

Two of these steps carry almost all the quality: choosing the source and writing the motion. The rest is mechanical, so that is where the detail below concentrates.

Step 1: Pick a source that animates well

A clip is only as stable as the picture you feed it. Before writing a word of motion, look for these traits in the source:

One clear main subject and a readable silhouette.
A face that is not hidden, with an obvious focal point.
Enough empty space around the subject for the movement you plan.
Clean separation between character and background.
Simple, recognizable clothing shapes, since heavy detail flickers once things move.

And the sources that fight you:

Crowded multi-character scenes.
Extreme poses or cropped faces and limbs.
Heavy text sitting over the picture.
A tiny character lost in a large environment.
Any existing anatomy error, which the motion will amplify.

None of these are impossible to animate. They just cost more revision passes, so go in expecting a few.

Step 2: Decide what moves

Once you have the image, the temptation is to make everything move. That is the fastest route to an unstable clip. A cleaner result starts with one main motion, maybe a couple of quiet supporting movements, and a clear list of what stays locked.

Think in terms of a single central action, such as a head turn or a smile, then decide whether hair, clothing, or background moves a little to support it, and what the camera does. Everything else holds still on purpose. Asking for six things at once does not add drama. It splits the model's attention, and the character is usually what suffers.

Step 3: Write the motion, not the picture

The most common prompting error in an AI anime animation run is describing the image again. The model can already see it. A good motion instruction names who or what moves, how the movement happens, its speed or intensity, what the camera does, any background motion, and what should stay consistent.

Here is the same character written at three scales:

# Subtle: a quiet loop
gentle wind in her hair, a single slow blink, camera holds still

# Focused: an introduction
she slowly turns her head to meet the viewer's eyes, a soft smile,
gentle wind, slow camera push in

# Ambitious: where the model starts making its own calls
she turns to face the viewer, hair blowing in the wind,
leaves swirling around her, camera orbits around her

The first is a quiet loop. The second is a focused introduction. The third is ambitious, and as the test below shows, ambition is exactly where the model starts deciding things for you.

Case study: two passes on PixAI

I generated the source on Tsubaki.2 with this prompt:

an original anime character, a young woman with long dark red hair in a
loose braid, gold eyes, a small beauty mark below one eye, wearing a cream
trench coat and a knit scarf, standing on a quiet city street at dusk,
looking to the side away from the viewer, autumn leaves on the ground,
cinematic, anime illustration

The side glance was deliberate. Because she is already looking away, a turn toward the camera has somewhere to go, instead of inventing motion from a flat front-on portrait. Goal: a calm, cinematic five second OC introduction. Video model: V3.2.

First pass, overloaded on purpose:

the character turns to face the viewer and smiles, hair blowing hard in
the wind, leaves swirling around her, camera orbits around her, lights
flickering, dramatic motion

The result was instructive. The character held together completely, no identity drift across the full clip: braid, gold eyes, beauty mark, coat, and scarf all consistent. The head turn was the strongest part, moving from side profile toward us smoothly, with the model reconstructing the unseen side of her face without swapping her identity.

What it did not do was deliver the drama. The camera never orbited, it rotated her toward us while the frame stayed put. The wind never reached blowing hard, the leaves drifted rather than swirled, and the flickering barely showed. Faced with too many instructions, PixAI kept the character stable and dropped the effects it could not do safely. It also generated a short Japanese voice greeting on its own, with no lip sync, so her mouth stayed still while the audio played.

Revised pass, focused on one motion:

the character faces the viewer the entire time, no turning, only a soft
smile forming and a single slow blink, gentle wind in her hair, camera
holds still, keep her face and outfit exactly consistent

This was the clip I kept. With fewer things to manage, the model had room to do the subtle work well. The smile formed gradually instead of snapping on, the slow blink was clean with no eye distortion, and the hair moved just enough to feel alive without pulling focus. Face, beauty mark, eye color, coat, and scarf stayed locked throughout, and the still camera kept attention on her expression.

One instruction it did not fully follow: I asked her to face the viewer the entire time, yet the clip still opened with her looking to the side before turning, carried over from the source image. Small, but useful, because it shows how much weight the model gives the pose in your starting picture.

On the same image, the focused instruction produced the more cinematic result. Not because the model failed the harder prompt, but because one well-chosen motion is something it can execute cleanly.

Keeping the character consistent

A few habits do most of the work. Start from a clean, finished image, since the video inherits only what is already there. Keep the main motion focused. When you do not need full-body movement, let the camera carry it, since a slow push-in reads as cinematic while asking little of the character. Review the face, hair, clothing, accessories, and proportions in the first result, revise unstable sections instead of accepting them, and drop to a shorter clip when one refuses to settle. The target is recognition, not a pixel-perfect copy of the source.

Troubleshooting reference

When a first clip goes wrong, the fix is almost always in the instruction or the source. Here is the quick map from symptom to fix:

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
Identity changes, face or hands wobble	Motion is doing too much	Cut to one main action, let the camera carry the rest
Clothing details flicker	Outfit too detailed for the motion	Simplify the outfit or reduce nearby movement
Motion feels too weak	Model is protecting stability	Raise the intensity of one effect, not the count
Motion feels too strong	Over-driven effect	Lower that one effect's intensity
Background distracts	Camera or scene motion competing	Ask for a stiller frame
Clip drifts from source	Starting pose does not match target motion	Choose a source whose pose already fits

The PixAI image-to-video guide goes deeper on model choice and motion tuning, and the PixAI video docs cover model differences and settings. To chain generation and animation into one node canvas, PixAI Studio is the connected workspace for it.

Where the workflow goes next

Once it clicks, the same steps produce OC introductions, a manga panel animated with AI to tease a story, game-style skill moments for original characters, looping wallpapers from subtle motion, and shorts for feeds. The steps stay fixed. What changes is the source and the one motion you lead with.

Before any of that, you need a good source image, and that starts with the prompt. I keep a free library of over 1,000 anime prompt ideas with themed prompts and a mix-and-match builder, no signup, running in the browser.

Wrap-up

To turn an illustration into animation is two good decisions and some patience. Pick a source that suits the movement, plan one focused motion, write the instruction around what changes, then review and revise the part that missed. That is the line between a still and a short that feels alive, and it is why an AI animated short generator rewards restraint over ambition.

If you want to run this on your own art, start with PixAI and animate a single character. One clip teaches more than any guide.

Building a Node-Based AI Art Workflow for Anime, From Prompt to Video

Naveed W — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:05:32 +0000

An AI art workflow is an ordered set of creative steps where the output of one becomes the input for the next. Generate a character, refine the image, turn the version you like into a short clip. That's a fundamentally different thing than using an AI tool for a single image. A one-off generation starts and ends in the same place. A workflow keeps going, and it remembers where it's been.

This post walks through building one complete anime project, a character introduction that starts as a text prompt and ends as a five-second animated clip, inside PixAI Studio, a node-based canvas.

I'll cover the two concepts that make a node-based AI workflow work, then the actual three-stage build, prompts and honest rough edges included.

Why connect the steps at all

Most of the friction in anime creation isn't the generating. It's moving things between steps. Make a character in one tool, export it, upload to an editor, export again, upload into a video tool, that's the pattern most people fall into. You retype settings, lose track of which version was the good one, and rebuild context from memory every time you continue a character.

A connected AI image generation workflow keeps the character, the scene, and the video in the same space, so the output of one stage is already sitting there as the input to the next. That said, this isn't a universal upgrade. If you only want one standalone image, a plain generator is faster, and reaching for a node canvas would just slow you down. The connected approach pays off specifically once a project has more than one stage.

The two concepts that cover most of it

A node-based AI workflow looks technical at a glance, but the logic reduces to two ideas.

The node. Each node is one asset or one creative step: an image, a video, a piece of text, audio. Prompts, reference images, and existing artwork go in one side; generated images, edited versions, or clips come out the other.

The connection. A line from one node to the next means the output of the first becomes the input of the second. A generated image flows straight into a video step without being exported and re-uploaded anywhere. Keeping everything visible on a single canvas is the actual point, you see the whole project at once instead of hunting through separate apps and download folders.

Starting: blank canvas or template

Two ways to begin. A blank canvas suits you when you already know the stages you want and prefer to wire them yourself.

A template suits you when you'd rather start from a working setup and swap in your own assets. PixAI Studio ships with official templates for common anime jobs, replace the images inside and generate.

You can also clone a workspace another creator shared, open a piece you like, use View Process to see how it was built, then Clone Workspace to bring the whole setup onto your canvas.

For this project I used a blank canvas, three clear stages, wired myself. Click "Add node," pick image, write the prompt, select a model, generate.

The build: three connected stages

Goal, set deliberately narrow before adding a single node: a five-second animated introduction of an original character, calm and cinematic, recognizable from the first frame to the last.

Stage 1: generate the character

First node, Image type. Model: Tsubaki.2. Prompt in plain language:

an original anime character, a quiet young woman with chin-length silver hair swept to one side, soft teal eyes, a thin silver ear cuff, wearing an oversized charcoal coat over a high-neck sweater, standing calmly, plain background, soft studio lighting, anime illustration

Result matched closely. Silver side-swept hair, teal eyes, thin ear cuff, charcoal coat over the high-neck sweater, all present, and the calm, reserved mood came through in expression and posture, not just individual features.

One small miss: hair fell slightly past chin length in a few strands. No hands in frame meant nothing for the model to distort. A clean starting point, which matters, since every later stage inherits it.

Stage 2: build the scene, keep the character

Second node continues from the first, connected via Reference Pro. This is the real test of whether a connected workflow holds up, since it asks whether the character survives a much more complex scene than the plain portrait.

the same character standing on a rooftop at dusk, city lights spread out below, light wind moving her hair and coat, looking out over the city, cinematic wide shot, anime illustration

She stayed recognizable. Silver hair, teal eyes, charcoal coat, high-neck sweater, all carried over, and so did the calm expression, which is usually the first thing to slip when a scene changes this much.

Composition placed her to the right, let the lit city fill the left, gave the frame scale and a reason to follow her gaze.

Two honest notes. The thin ear cuff, one of her defining details in the portrait, became hard to make out at this wider distance.

And the coat moved less than the prompt suggested, wind read clearly in her hair but barely in the fabric. Neither broke the shot, but both are the kind of thing worth checking rather than assuming held.

Stage 3: animate into video

Third node turns the still into motion. In Studio, drag the connector out from the image node, choose Video, and the image you already made attaches as the reference automatically, nothing to re-upload. This is the AI image to video workflow stage, and it's where a lot of pipelines fall apart, since a good picture doesn't guarantee a good animation.

Model: V4.0 Preview. Five seconds, 720p, 60,000 credits.

gentle wind moving her hair and coat, slow camera push in, a single slow blink, distant city lights flickering softly

This came out the strongest part of the project. The slow camera move inward gave the clip real camera work rather than a still image with drift added on top. Wind moved through her hair smoothly across the whole clip, and this time the coat picked up subtle movement too.

City lights shimmered without pulling attention, the slow blink landed naturally, a small thing that does a lot to make a character feel present.

Most importantly, she didn't drift. Face, hair, eyes, clothing stayed stable from first frame to last, and the rooftop held its shape while the camera moved, no warping skyline. If you've used image-to-video tools before, that stability is usually the part that gives out first.

Reviewing against the goal

Hold the finished clip against what was set out at the start. Goal was a calm, recognizable, cinematic OC introduction. The chain delivered it: the portrait set her identity, the rooftop scene expanded it into an environment, the video preserved both while adding restrained motion. At no point did she stop looking like the same person.

Reusing existing artwork

You don't always start from a blank prompt. Often the character already exists, and the job is continuing her. PixAI Studio connects to your existing PixAI library, so you pull a piece you made earlier straight onto the canvas with Import from PixAI, no re-uploading or reorganizing files.

From there, build a new scene, a variation, or a fresh format around a character you already have, and keep every related output in one workspace. That's how a static illustration becomes a video, or one character grows into a serialized set of scenes.

Worth framing correctly: think of Studio as maintaining continuity, not promising an identical copy every single time. Across the three stages above, the character held up well, but a wider angle can still hide a small detail like an ear cuff, so continuity is something to guide and check at each step, not assume automatically.

Common failure modes, and the fixes

A connected workflow can still go wrong, and most of the trouble traces back to a handful of habits rather than the tools themselves.

Most common: starting without a clear final output, which leads to endless generating with no direction. Close behind: adding nodes you don't need, turning a simple project into a maze. A few others that show up often: connecting the wrong output into the next step, feeding an unsuitable image into the video stage and expecting clean motion, making a large change too early before the base is solid, and skipping review of an in-between result so a small problem carries all the way to the end.

The fixes are the same in every case: set the goal first, keep the chain as short as the project allows, review each stage before building on it, only add a node when the project actually needs it.

When this approach is actually useful

A node-based AI workflow is a tool, not a requirement. It fits when a project has more than one stage or more than one asset: several images from a single OC, moving a still into animation, developing related scenes for a manga or story, reusing artwork you already own, building a repeatable process you'll run again next month. It's also the natural home for projects that mix media, images, video, and text together in one piece.

If you only need one standalone image and nothing after it, a plain anime generator is the quicker choice, and there's no reason to open a canvas for it.

Putting it together

An effective AI content creation workflow starts with a clear creative goal and connects only the stages needed to reach it. Plan the final output, wire image generation into editing into animation, review each step before building on it, reuse the assets you already have, and keep the whole process in one place instead of chasing files between apps. That's the actual difference between generating an image and finishing a project.

For the node types in more depth, the full PixAI Studio walkthrough covers each one, and the PixAI image-to-video guide goes deeper on model choice and motion prompts for the animation stage specifically. If you want to build an anime creation workflow this way yourself, try it on PixAI and run one character through to video. That single project shows you more than any amount of reading will.

Civitai Alternative for Anime Creators, Five Tests Past the First Image

Naveed W — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:35:28 +0000

Civitai has the biggest model library on the internet, full stop. Nobody's disputing that. The question I actually wanted answered, if you're weighing a Civitai alternative for anime work or comparing Civitai vs PixAI honestly, isn't about the library. It's what happens after the browsing stops, when you sit down to build one anime character and keep her the same across a whole series. If you're testing either as an anime AI generator or an AI character generator specifically, that's the distinction that matters. I ran one original character through five prompts on both, Z Image Turbo on Civitai, Tsubaki.2 on PixAI, from a first portrait to an in-place edit.

The character

Long dark purple wavy hair with a single white front streak, amber eyes, a small beauty mark under the right eye, round glasses, a black high-collared coat with gold buttons. The glasses, the streak, and the beauty mark are the easy tells for drift.

Test 1: create the character

Different engines, different prompt language, so the prompts aren't identical. PixAI got plain sentences (Tsubaki.2 reads natural language). Civitai got Danbooru-style tags (what Z Image Turbo actually expects): masterpiece, best quality, very aesthetic, absurdres, anime, anime style, 1girl, solo, long wavy hair, purple hair, white streak, amber eyes, mole under eye, round eyewear, black coat, high collar, gold buttons, calm expression, simple background, soft studio lighting, upper body

Both excellent. Civitai read the tags cleanly, purple hair, streak, amber eyes, glasses, coat, strong rendering, clean anatomy. Slips: the beauty mark came out too faint to register, and the coat leaned toward a school uniform. PixAI kept the beauty mark (a detail many models drop) and pulled the framing back past upper body since I hadn't specified a crop.

Test 1, Civitai left, PixAI right

Verdict: narrow PixAI edge on fine detail, genuine tie on overall quality. Worth flagging for anyone new to this: my first Civitai attempt, before adding explicit anime style tags, came back as a photorealistic woman, not anime at all. On an Illustrious or turbo model, you anchor the style yourself, or you don't get it. PixAI's Tsubaki.2 read the word "anime" inside an ordinary sentence and gave an anime character on the first try, no tag knowledge required.

Test 2: same character, new scene

Prompt: the same character standing in a quiet old library at night, tall shelves behind her, holding an open book, warm lamplight, looking at the viewer, anime illustration

PixAI via Reference Pro, Civitai via the first image added as a reference resource. Both held the character, and this is the test that shows Civitai is genuinely capable of real consistency, hair, streak, eyes, glasses, coat, all carried over, hands drawn well on the book. Two misses: the beauty mark dropped again, and "night" plus "lamplight" produced an evenly lit room with no real nighttime mood. PixAI kept the beauty mark and read the lighting correctly, warm lamp against cool window light.

Test 2, Civitai left, PixAI right

Verdict: PixAI, by a small margin on detail and atmosphere.

Test 3: new outfit, new expression, and this is where it splits

Prompt: the same character, now in a casual oversized hoodie, hair down, grinning while eating ramen at a small street stall, evening city lights behind her, anime illustration

On Civitai I set up ControlNet with a Canny edge preprocessor on the first image, the on-site route to holding a character through a bigger change. PixAI kept identity and delivered everything asked for, hoodie, hair down, grin, ramen, stall, city lights, with only the beauty mark slightly hidden by angle.

Civitai kept the face perfectly and lost most of the prompt. No hoodie, a buttoned collared shirt instead. No ramen, no eating, no stall. The grin softened to a mild smile. The mechanism explains it: the Canny edge map traced the upright, coated pose of the first image and held the new generation to that structure, so the outfit and action literally couldn't change. It kept her consistent by copying her pose, which is the opposite of what a new outfit and action need.

Test 3, Civitai left, PixAI right

Verdict: PixAI, decisively. Workflow friction compounded it: that single Civitai image cost 14 Buzz, the queue ran slow enough to trigger a refund-offer message, and getting there took three separate controls (ControlNet, preprocessor selection, image routing). On PixAI, the same change was one reference image and one sentence.

Test 4: style control with a LoRA

Prompt: a small fox spirit curled up on a mossy shrine step, paper lanterns glowing, soft mist, muted twilight palette, anime illustration

On PixAI, a community style LoRA attached in one click, giving a soft painterly finish and a faithful muted twilight palette. Only slip: the fox read a little more humanoid than intended.

On Civitai, I couldn't attach a LoRA at all. The on-site generator only surfaces LoRAs built for your selected base model, and the newer model I'd chosen had none available yet in the picker. Worth being precise about what this is and isn't: Civitai has the largest LoRA library that exists, period. The issue was specifically that my chosen base model was too new to have compatible entries surfaced, and the fix would've been switching to an older, widely supported base like Illustrious. Without a style LoRA, the result drifted toward a realistic fox rather than a stylized anime spirit. Good image, wrong genre for the prompt.

Test 4, Civitai left, PixAI right

Verdict: PixAI, on workflow rather than raw capability. Civitai's library depth doesn't help if base-model compatibility blocks you from using it in the moment.

Test 5: an in-platform edit

Took the test 3 image and asked each tool for a small targeted change. Prompt: change her coat from black to deep red and add a small silver pin on the collar, keep everything else the same

PixAI, via Flow Edit, made exactly that change and left everything else alone, hoodie to deep red, pin added near the collar, hair, streak, eyes, glasses, ramen, stall, city lights all untouched. Read as an edit, not a fresh generation.

Civitai did not preserve the image. Instead of adjusting the coat, it produced an entirely new picture, a realistic human portrait, gray hair, red eyes, no glasses, no streak, no beauty mark, a trench coat instead of the hoodie, the whole ramen scene gone. The coat came out gray, not red, no pin. Worth noting Civitai does have a masked inpainting tool that's the actual right choice for a change this precise, and it would likely have done far better. The plain prompt-based edit I ran simply regenerated the frame instead of editing it.

Test 5, Civitai left, PixAI right

Verdict: PixAI, and this is the test result I'd weight most heavily for anyone who refines images after generating them.

Scorecard

Test	What it measured	Result
1: create character	Prompt fidelity, different formats	Tie, narrow PixAI edge on detail
2: new scene	Consistency through a scene change	PixAI, small margin
3: new outfit/action	Consistency through a bigger change	PixAI, decisive
4: style LoRA	Style application workflow	PixAI, on friction not capability
5: in-place edit	Localized editing vs regeneration	PixAI, largest gap

What this actually shows

On the first image and a straight scene change, these tools are close, and Civitai's image quality was never the issue at any point in this test. The gap opens specifically on everything past the easy version: changing outfit and action, applying a style, making a small edit. PixAI did each with one reference or one sentence. Civitai needed ControlNet, a compatible base model, or a masking tool to have a chance, and lost the prompt anyway when I took the direct route rather than the correct specialized one.

That's not "Civitai makes worse pictures." It's that the road from idea to finished, consistent character has more decisions on it, and more places for a good image to go sideways if you pick the wrong tool for the specific job. An anime model generator built around one consistent workflow trades away that raw configurability for fewer decision points, which only matters if hitting the wrong decision point is a cost you're trying to avoid.

Cost, since it's part of the real comparison

Civitai runs on Buzz, and since late 2025 it comes in three colors. Blue Buzz is free, earned through daily rewards, covers SFW generation, a new account starts with a small amount that roughly ten images exhausts at 10-14 Buzz each. Yellow Buzz is the paid currency on the main site, and it's crypto-only, card payments were removed over content-policy issues with processors. To pay with a card you use Civitai.green, a separate SFW site with its own Green Buzz. Memberships: Bronze $10, Silver $25, Gold $50.

PixAI: one credit type, daily free credits, pay with a normal card if you choose to. Starter $9.99, Plus $29.99, Premium $49.99, adding monthly bonus credits, faster generation, and free monthly LoRA training. Neither is universally cheaper, but the PixAI path from signup to paid is shorter and doesn't route through a currency detour.

Comparison table

	Civitai	PixAI
Image quality	Excellent with the right model	Excellent, tuned for anime
First anime image	Strong, needs anime tags added	Strong, reads plain sentences
Prompt format	Danbooru tags	Natural language
Character consistency	Held the face, manual setup	Held the face with one reference
Outfit and pose change	ControlNet locked the old pose	Changed freely, kept identity
Style LoRA	Depends on base-model match	One-click community LoRAs
In-platform edit	Regenerated the whole image	Localized edit, rest preserved
Getting started	Pick from thousands of models	Pick one anime model and go
Currency	Buzz, small free allowance	Daily free credits
Best fit	Discovery, tuning, custom setups	Finished, repeatable anime characters

Who each one fits

Civitai if discovery and control are what you enjoy: browsing thousands of community models and LoRAs, tuning every setting, running weights locally in ComfyUI or Forge. It's the best home for that, and nothing in these five tests argues otherwise.

PixAI if you mainly make anime art and OCs, want a character to stay consistent across outfits and scenes, want LoRA support without matching base models by hand, want reference and editing tools on the same screen, or would rather spend an hour making art than managing the setup around it. That's really the difference between an OC art generator built around one workflow and a general-purpose library you configure yourself.

For the mechanics behind what held up here: training your own character LoRA covers turning a consistent character into a reusable asset and functions as an anime LoRA generator once a design is locked in, and PixAI Studio is a node-based canvas for longer pipelines like serialized comic work. If you want the fuller Buzz-system breakdown, there's a complete Civitai review that walks through it. Try PixAI if you want to run your own character through a second scene, that one test tells you most of what you need to know.

Midjourney Alternative for Anime, Five Tests on the Same Character

Naveed W — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:37:27 +0000

Midjourney is one of the best anime AI generators around, so if you're comparing Midjourney vs PixAI expecting a quality gap, that's not really where this goes. The actual test that matters for anime creators is narrower: does one character survive from image to image, same hair, same eyes, same face, across a full pipeline rather than a single generation. If you're evaluating either as an anime character generator or an AI character creator specifically, that's the distinction worth testing before anything else. I ran one original character through five prompts on both, same prompts on each, from a first portrait to a full reference sheet, to find out.

The character and the setup

Dark teal hair in a high side ponytail, heterochromia with one gold eye and one violet eye, a small crescent moon tattoo under the left eye, a deep red haori over a fitted black outfit. Distinctive on purpose, so any drift is easy to spot. Tsubaki.2 in Pro mode on PixAI, Midjourney's V8 for generation.

Test 1: create the character

Prompt: an original anime character, a calm young woman with dark teal hair in a high side ponytail, heterochromia with one gold eye and one violet eye, a small crescent moon tattoo under her left eye, wearing a deep red haori over a fitted black outfit, plain background, soft studio lighting, anime illustration

Both landed every requested feature, the ponytail, the two-color eyes, the tattoo, the haori. The split was style and read: PixAI gave a calm, understated expression matching the prompt and a clean modern anime look. Midjourney rendered a confident smile, a looser ponytail, and a painterly, semi-realistic finish that read more mature than "anime illustration" asked for. Neither is wrong in the abstract, but PixAI followed the brief more literally, so I used each tool's own result as its reference going forward.

Midjourney Test 1 (left), PixAI Test 1 (right)

Test 2: same character, new scene

Prompt: the same character standing on a rain-slicked city street at night, neon signs reflecting in the puddles, holding a paper umbrella, looking back over her shoulder, cinematic angle, anime illustration

First real consistency test. PixAI via Reference Pro, Midjourney via both omni reference and style reference slots (its intended way to carry a character forward). Both nailed the scene, neon, reflections, umbrella, pose. The character is where they split: Midjourney kept hair, haori, outfit, and tattoo, but both eyes came back gold, the heterochromia gone. PixAI kept everything, including the one gold and one violet eye, plus a more accurate ponytail and a fuller-body frame.

Midjourney Test 2 (left), PixAI Test 2 (right)

Verdict: PixAI. For a single image, a gold eye instead of violet doesn't register as an error. For a character you're building a series around, that's the exact detail that breaks continuity.

Test 3: new outfit, new expression

Prompt: the same character, now wearing a cream knit sweater and scarf, laughing warmly, sitting at a cafe table with a cup of coffee, morning light through the window, cozy mood, anime illustration

Method note: I used Midjourney's style reference here instead of omni reference, which tracks art style more than character identity, so the drift below reflects that choice, not necessarily a hard ceiling. Both nailed the scene, sweater, scarf, coffee, warm light, easy laugh. PixAI's Reference Pro run held the teal hair and heterochromia. Midjourney's hair drifted toward reddish-brown and the two-color eyes disappeared, reading as the same style rather than the same character. Shared miss on both sides: neither tool preserved the small crescent moon tattoo, even sitting right there in the reference image.

Midjourney Test 3 (left), PixAI Test 3 (right)

Verdict: PixAI on identity, with both losing the same small detail.

Test 4: style control on a fresh subject

Prompt: a lone swordsman resting under a red maple tree, traditional robes, autumn leaves falling in the wind, muted painterly palette, anime illustration

New subject, no LoRA, base model only, testing pure art direction interpretation. Close tie. Midjourney went wide and painterly, reading like traditional concept art. PixAI framed tighter and more cinematic, cleaner linework, warm backlighting, a nice detail of the sheathed sword against the trunk. Both drifted slightly more saturated than the "muted palette" requested.

Midjourney Test 4 (left), PixAI Test 4 (right)

Verdict: tie, taste split rather than accuracy split. Midjourney reads as traditional painting, PixAI reads as modern anime.

Test 5: a character reference sheet

Prompt: a character reference sheet of the same character, front view, side view, and back view, neutral standing pose, plain background, consistent design across all three views, anime illustration

The workflow closer, and the test that matters most if the goal is a reusable design rather than a single picture. PixAI via Edit Pro (handles multi-view work better than Reference Pro), Midjourney via Styles plus the test 4 image as a style reference. Both understood the task and produced front, side, and back views on a plain background.

Where they split was consistency between views. Midjourney's sheet looked appealing but redrew the character slightly differently per angle, different facial proportions between front and side, shifted clothing folds and belt placement, poses leaning stylized rather than neutral. It reads as three nice illustrations of a similar character, not one design from three sides. PixAI's Edit Pro run kept proportions, construction, colors, and silhouette nearly identical across all three, with neutral poses and restrained rendering. Only miss: the side view wasn't a strict ninety-degree profile.

Midjourney Test 5 (left), PixAI Test 5 (right)

Verdict: PixAI, and by a real margin this time. For an actual usable turnaround, that Edit Pro run cost 10,000 credits, the same as one day of the free tier.

Scorecard

Test	What it measured	Result
1: create character	Base prompt fidelity	PixAI, closer to brief
2: new scene	Identity through a scene change	PixAI, clearly
3: new outfit/expression	Identity under bigger change	PixAI on identity, shared tattoo miss
4: style, fresh subject	Pure art direction, no character stakes	Tie
5: reference sheet	Multi-view design consistency	PixAI, largest margin

What this actually shows

On single, standalone images, these two are close enough that taste decides, test 4 makes that plain. The split opens specifically around reused-character work, tests 2, 3, and 5, where PixAI held fine identifying detail (hair color, eye color, proportions across views) that Midjourney's own consistency tools carried loosely. Worth being fair to Midjourney here: its character consistency tooling has genuinely improved, and across a straight scene change it carries most of a design without much trouble. It just doesn't hold the small, specific markers as tightly as a purpose-built reference workflow does.

Both tools missed the same tiny facial tattoo across every test that included it, worth noting as a shared limitation rather than a point of difference. Neither treats a very small facial mark as a feature to protect by default.

Cost, since it's part of any real decision

Midjourney: subscription only, no free tier. Basic $10/month, Standard $30, Pro $60, Mega $120, roughly 20% off annual. You're buying GPU time, not a fixed image count, so a light month on Basic can run out faster than expected. Private generation (Stealth mode) requires Pro and up, so keeping work out of the public gallery effectively starts at $60/month.

PixAI: free tier with 10,000 daily credits (12,000 on a paid plan), credits don't expire. Starter $9.99/month, Plus $29.99, Premium $49.99, cheaper annual. Paid plans add bonus credits, faster generation, and free monthly LoRA training. Private by default on every tier, including free.

Comparison table

	Midjourney	PixAI
Image quality	Excellent, often painterly/semi-realistic	Excellent, clean modern anime
Prompt accuracy on anime prompts	Strong, leans semi-real	Strong, follows anime brief more literally
Character consistency across scenes	Holds broad design, reinterprets fine features	Holds design including hair/eye color
Small identity details	Lost heterochromia and tattoo	Kept heterochromia, lost tattoo
Reference sheet	Appealing, views drift	Consistent across views, production usable
Free tier	None	Daily free credits
Privacy	Private only on Pro+	Private by default, every tier
Custom characters	Reference-based, no trained models	Reference Pro plus trainable character LoRA
Entry price	$10/month, no free option	Free tier, then $9.99/month

Building past single images

Once you have a consistent character, the next step is making her a reusable asset rather than something re-referenced by hand every session. That's what character LoRA training is for, a set of consistent images (the reference sheet from test 5, for example) trains a small model you can call on demand without re-uploading a reference. Midjourney has no equivalent, its consistency lives entirely in per-generation referencing.

PixAI also recently added PixAI Studio, a node-based canvas connecting generation, editing, and asset steps into one workflow, useful if you're running a full concept-to-reference-sheet-to-scenes pipeline rather than a stack of separate exports.

Who each one actually fits

Midjourney if image quality and composition are the top priority and you mostly make standalone pieces, concept art, creative exploration where every generation should look like finished art. It's a strong tool and these tests back that up plainly.

PixAI if you're building OCs or characters you reuse across many images, need real reference sheets, want a free tier to learn on, want privacy by default, or want to eventually own a trained character model rather than re-referencing forever. That's really the definition of an OC art generator versus a general-purpose one.

For the mechanics behind the workflows above: Reference Pro for scene-to-scene consistency, Edit Pro for multi-view reference sheets, and training your own character LoRA, which also makes PixAI function as an anime LoRA generator once a design is locked in. The membership guide has the full pricing breakdown. If you want to see how your own character holds up, try PixAI and run one through a second scene, that one test tells you most of what you need to know.

Niji Journey Alternative for Anime, Five Identical Prompts, One Real Difference

Naveed W — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:08:41 +0000

Niji Journey makes good anime art. Anyone who's used it already knows that, so this isn't a Niji Journey alternative post built on "the pictures aren't good enough." It's built on a narrower question: if you're comparing Niji Journey vs PixAI specifically for character work, where do they actually agree, and where do they genuinely split? I ran five identical prompts through both, Niji 7 on Niji Journey, Tsubaki.2 on PixAI, and logged the result of each.

The five tests, individually scored

Test 1: two characters, distinct personalities

two friends walking to a magic academy together on the first day, one tall girl with long silver hair and a confident grin, one shorter boy with messy black hair looking nervous, both in matching gray-and-blue uniforms carrying spellbooks, cherry blossom trees along a stone path, bright morning light, anime illustration

Niji: wider, more cinematic composition, clean overall scene. PixAI: followed the personality descriptions more precisely, confident grin, visible nervousness down to posture and a sweat drop, a more convincing height difference. Verdict: PixAI, since the prompt leaned on personality contrast more than setting, and that's what PixAI rendered more accurately. Both undersold the "magic" part of the academy.

Niji Journey Test 1 (left), PixAI Test 1 (right)

Test 2: single character portrait

1girl, a friendly witch-in-training with short mint-green hair, round amber eyes, a small star-shaped hairclip, wearing a navy pointed hat and a matching cape over a white blouse, holding a tiny glowing potion bottle, soft smile, plain warm background, anime illustration

Niji: slightly more literal on outfit detail. PixAI: gave the potion bottle and hairclip a stronger magical glow without losing accuracy. Verdict: tie. Both nailed the character close to exactly. This one comes down to taste, not correctness.

Niji Journey Test2 (left), PixAI Test 2 (right)

Test 3: same character, new scene, using a reference

same character, now sitting on the floor of a cozy potion shop surrounded by shelves of colorful bottles, reading an open spellbook in her lap, warm candlelight, evening mood, anime illustration

![ ](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xkjvhyiudcwqv91g33t2.jpg)
_Niji Journey Test 3 (left), PixAI Test 3 (right)_

This is the test that actually separates an anime reference image generator from a general one, whether feeding a prior image back in as a reference locks the character or just loosely inspires the next generation.

PixAI, using Reference Pro: the witch came back unmistakably herself, mint-green hair, amber eyes, star hairclip, hat, cape, all held. Niji Journey: beautiful scene, but her hair drifted toward blonde with only faint mint-green left at the tips, and the hairstyle grew longer. Same outfit, different person.

Verdict: PixAI, clearly. This isn't a rendering quality gap, both scenes were well made. It's a difference in what "reference" means to each tool. Niji appears to treat a reference image as loose inspiration; PixAI treats it as an identity lock. For a single image, that distinction is invisible. For a character you're building across a series, it's the only thing that matters.

Test 4: character plus a style LoRA

1boy, a cheerful street musician with wavy chestnut hair and freckles, wearing a mustard cardigan and a scarf, playing an acoustic guitar on a sunny park bench, autumn leaves in the air, warm afternoon light, anime illustration

Added a style LoRA (Fog) on the PixAI side. Both nailed chestnut hair, freckles, cardigan, scarf, guitar, warm light. PixAI's render was softer with more realistic guitar proportions; Niji leaned into a brighter expression. Verdict: tie, and a good demonstration that one-click LoRA style control (attach with a click, trigger words auto-added) can shift the finish without pulling the image off the described character. If you're testing an anime LoRA generator specifically, this is the behavior you want, style changes without content drift.

Niji Journey Test 4 (left), PixAI Test 4 with the Fog LoRA (right)

Test 5: emotional two-character scene

a young bride and groom sharing a quiet moment just after their wedding ceremony, the bride gently holding the groom's hands while smiling through happy tears, the groom looking at her with warmth and affection, elegant white wedding dress, classic black tuxedo, soft flower petals drifting through the air, warm golden sunset light streaming through large windows, intimate and emotional atmosphere, subtle smiles, realistic body language, highly detailed anime illustration

Niji: wider, softer, cinematic. PixAI: tighter framing, visible happy tears, sustained eye contact, natural hand placement. Verdict: PixAI, by a small margin, since the prompt was built around intimacy rather than scale, and the tighter emotional framing served that better. Both images were genuinely beautiful.

Niji Journey Test 5 next (left), PixAI Test 5 (right)

Scorecard

Test	What it measured	Result
1: two characters	Personality-driven prompt accuracy	PixAI
2: single portrait	General prompt fidelity	Tie
3: reference reuse	Character identity lock	PixAI, clearly
4: style LoRA	Style control without content drift	Tie
5: emotional scene	Framing and emotional read	PixAI, narrowly

Across five tests, nothing here suggests Niji Journey is a weaker anime AI generator on raw output. Its images were consistently excellent, often more cinematic than PixAI's. The one test with a clear, unambiguous gap was test 3, and it happens to be the test that determines whether either tool works for building a character you'll reuse.

Why this one test matters more than the other four

Tests 1, 2, 4, and 5 are all one-shot generations. Test 3 is the only one that depends on the platform actually preserving identity across a second, independent generation. That's a fundamentally different capability than prompt-following, and it's the one that decides whether a tool functions as a real anime character generator versus just a very good anime image generator.

If your workflow is standalone pieces, tests 1 through 5 tell you these platforms are close enough that taste should decide. If your workflow involves an OC you draw on repeatedly, test 3 is the only result that should carry real weight, since it's the only one that isolates the capability you actually depend on.

The rest of the comparison, for completeness

	Niji Journey	PixAI
Free tier	None, requires a Midjourney subscription	Daily free credits
Privacy	Public by default below higher plans	Private by default
Custom characters	No user-trained character models	Train your own character LoRA
Style control	Built-in styles	One-click community LoRAs

Takeaway

If you want one striking, cinematic anime image and don't need to reuse the subject, Niji Journey earns its reputation, the tests above back that up plainly. If you're testing tools specifically as an OC art generator, something meant to keep a character recognizable image after image, test 3's result is the one to weight most heavily, and that's where PixAI held up. Test your own character on both before deciding, since the gap that matters here doesn't show up until the second generation.

For the workflow used in test 3, Reference Pro covers the mechanics, LoRA weight settings covers tuning style strength like in test 4, and the how to use PixAI guide covers the rest of the panel. Both platforms run as an AI anime generator online, nothing to install, so try PixAI if you want to run this same five-test comparison yourself.