Portraits

Character portraits help you visualize your story’s cast, and serve as your canonical reference for what each character looks like. Each character card in Story Bible can hold its own gallery of images, with one portrait chosen as the thumbnail that appears beside the character’s name when the card is collapsed.

You can upload images you already have, generate portraits directly in Sudowrite, or use a combination of both. Keep multiple portraits to explore different looks, outfits, and art styles as you develop your cast.

Portraits live at the top of each character card in the Characters section of Story Bible, above the written traits that describe your character.

When you generate a portrait, Sudowrite uses the character’s existing Physical Description as reference. There’s no need to copy those details into a separate image prompt. You can generate a portrait using what’s already on the card, tweak the Physical Description before doing so, or optionally add additional instructions to guide a particular image generation.

Scroll to the Characters section of your Story Bible and expand the character card you’d like to add an image to. You’ll see an empty portrait box labeled Portraits, which you can click to create their first portrait. Or if the character already has portraits, click the blank plus (+) tile to add more.

The portrait generation window that appears has two options: Generate and Upload.

Choose Upload in the upper right, then drag images into the upload area or click Drop or click to select images to choose files from your computer. Uploaded images become part of that character’s portrait gallery.

Your generated images are saved to the character’s gallery automatically. Select a result and click Set thumbnail if you’d like to use it as the character’s primary portrait. You can also toggle that thumbnail later.

There are four built-in portrait styles:

Select one style to generate a single portrait, or select multiple styles to compare different interpretations of your character. Selecting all four generates four portraits at once—one in each style.

You can also deselect every style. With no preset selected, the prompt field is labeled Appearance & style, and you can describe your own art direction there. Leaving that field totally blank will technically work, too: Sudowrite will exclusively reference your character’s physical description to generate a single portrait (in an altogether unimpressive “none” style).

Use Appearance details (or Appearance & style when no preset is selected) to guide clothing, props, expression, pose, or setting. Generated portraits currently use a head-and-shoulders (bust) composition for consistency. The field accepts up to 2,500 characters.

You only need to add the details you want to guide. For example:

With no preset style selected, you can also describe a visual treatment, such as “black-and-white pencil drawing,” or “vibrant multicolor graphic novel with thick line work.”

A reference image helps you show Sudowrite something you’d like incorporated into a generated portrait, such as an outfit, hairstyle, or atmosphere.

In the Generate view, click the image control beside Reference image to add your reference. Then use the accompanying instruction field to explain which elements to use—for example, “Dress the character in the jacket shown in this image.” Choose your other settings and click Generate.

Use Upload when you want to add an existing image directly to the gallery. Use Reference image when you want that image to help guide a new portrait.

The thumbnail is your character’s primary portrait. It appears beside their name when you collapse the character card, making it easier to recognize characters at a glance.

You can set it immediately after generation by selecting an image and clicking Set thumbnail. To change it later:

Choosing a different thumbnail keeps the other portraits in the gallery.

Open the portrait from the character’s gallery, click the image’s three-dot menu (•••), and choose Delete. This removes that image from the character card.

Portrait generation uses 5,000 credits per image. Generating one portrait uses 5,000 credits; generating all four styles at once uses 20,000 credits.