How many angles should a character reference sheet have for AI video generation?

Use four turnaround angles — front, side, profile, and back — plus a face close-up and a mid-angle close-up, generated at 4K. That is the documented spec from AI short film productions: four body angles cover wide and medium shots, while the close-up panels stop identity drift in tight shots where small details otherwise change.

Build the sheet as four turnaround angles plus close-up panels. In one documented production, character sheets were generated at 4K max with four angles — front, side, profile, back — plus face and mid-angle close-ups, and that set fed into the invideo agent kept characters consistent across an entire short film with no LoRA fine-tuning. The logic maps angles to coverage: front and three-quarter views serve close and medium shots, profile and back views serve coverage and reverse angles, and the full turnaround gives the model enough geometry to render the character from any camera position your shot list calls for.

The close-up panels are not optional extras — they exist because video models hallucinate whatever they cannot see. Character sheets must include close-up panels, not just wide shots, to hold small details like scars and accessories steady across generations; without a tight reference, every model fills in those details differently shot to shot, which is exactly what identity drift looks like. As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it: the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly, or it will imagine what's hidden.

You can run leaner than the full six-panel set when the character is simple. One 2-person team locked 4 characters and 1 prop with just 11 reference images total — headshots plus head-to-toe refs — and that carried a 3-minute animated episode at $950 all-in. A headshot plus a full-body reference is the practical floor; the four-angle turnaround with close-ups is the spec that survives complex coverage across a multi-scene film. On a 70-second short film, two characters held the same appearance across every scene using sheets attached to each generation — no fine-tuning involved.

Beyond the angle count itself, three adjacent rules are worth a line each: remove objects from the character's hands before generating the turnaround, since held props create inconsistency across angles; generate a few sheet options and lock the best before any video generation begins; and if a character's appearance changes mid-story (new costume piece, added accessory), create a separate sheet per visual beat rather than overloading one sheet with extra panels.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly, right? Or else it'll kind of hallucinate and imagine something that's under the cap. So, we don't want to do that. We always want the character to be seen as we see it on the character sheet.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director