Recraft vs Nano Banana Pro for AI character portrait generation — which should you use?

Use Recraft for the photoreal portrait — the casting headshot where you need pores, lines, stubble, and skin texture that read as a real face. Use Nano Banana Pro for the multi-angle character sheet — the four-angle turnaround at 4K with face and mid closeups, where prompt adherence and identity consistency across angles matter most.

The invideo agent routes both models for you, so you don't pick a platform — you pick a stage. Here's how the two split the character-portrait job inside one workflow.

Recraft — the photoreal casting portrait. Run Recraft when you're locking what your character's face actually looks like as a single hero portrait. As Hridaye puts it, "ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face." That texture is what makes the face read as cast rather than generated. Generate at 4K for the casting frame, then approve before anything downstream.

Nano Banana Pro — the multi-angle character sheet. Once the face is locked, switch to Nano Banana Pro for the 360-degree turnaround: four angles plus a face closeup and a mid closeup, generated at 4K max. Prompt adherence is the reason — Nano Banana Pro holds the same identity across angles tightly enough to use as the persistent reference every shot generation inherits. In documented productions the sheet is generated in four options per asset, and the best one is locked before any video work begins. One honest caveat from the same workflow: "Nano Banana Pro, it has insane prompt adherence. Something about these images felt extremely stock photo-y to me" — which is exactly why you don't use it for the photoreal portrait stage, and exactly why you do use it for the structured turnaround.

The split, end to end. Casting headshot → Recraft (texture, photorealism). Turnaround sheet with four angles + closeups → Nano Banana Pro (consistency, adherence). Remove props from hands before generating the multi-angle sheet so the angles stay clean. Include close-up panels on the sheet, not just wides — small details like scars or accessories drift between models otherwise. If a continuity error shows up later in a shot, ask the invideo agent to inspect the sheet rather than re-rolling the shot; in one production it identified the exact panel containing the error (an AirPod the character shouldn't have), fixed it at source, and every downstream shot inherited the correction.

Decision rule. If the question on screen is "does this face look real?", that's Recraft. If the question is "does this character stay the same person from angle to angle and shot to shot?", that's Nano Banana Pro. You don't pick one or the other for the whole film — you use both, in that order, and let the invideo agent carry the locked references into Seedance 2.0 for video.

These are the roles each model plays best — what works depends on how photoreal your casting frame needs to be versus how many angles your sheet has to hold.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director