Recraft vs Nano Banana Pro: which is better for AI film character and prop reference generation?

Neither wins outright — split the job. Recraft is better for casting portraits because it renders skin imperfections (pores, lines, stubble) that keep faces photorealistic. Nano Banana Pro is better for character sheets, turnarounds, and prop references because of its prompt adherence — it follows a multi-angle sheet spec reliably where portrait models drift.

Match each model to the reference type it's strongest at. Both run inside invideo, an agentic video creation tool with all the current image and video models available, so the invideo agent can route portraits to one and sheets to the other in a single session.

Recraft wins casting portraits and photorealistic faces. A documented production generated its character portraits with Recraft V4 at 4K specifically because of how it handles skin texture: "ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face." If your film is live-action-styled, lock each character's face in Recraft first — that portrait becomes the identity anchor every downstream reference has to match.

Nano Banana Pro wins character sheets, turnarounds, and prop refs. The same production then built 360-degree turnaround character sheets in Nano Banana at 4K max — four angles plus face and mid-angle close-ups — and the documented model ranking is direct: Nano Banana Pro outperforms Nano Banana 2 for character sheet generation. The trade-off cuts the other way on faces, in one filmmaker's verbatim assessment: "Nano Banana Pro, it has insane prompt adherence. Something about these images felt extremely stock photo-y to me." That sentence is the whole comparison — Pro executes your sheet spec precisely; Recraft's faces read as real people. Prop references sit on the Nano Banana side of the split for the same prompt-adherence reason: one animated production covered its complete reference needs — headshots and head-to-toe refs for 4 characters plus 1 prop — in just 11 images. Two rules make sheets from either model hold up in production: remove objects from characters' hands before generating turnarounds (held items drift across angles), and include close-up panels for small details like scars and accessories — "the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly... or else it'll kind of hallucinate."

When a specific character could go either way, test both at once. Run the identical casting prompt on both models simultaneously through the invideo agent and pick the aesthetic you prefer — a documented 3-day production used exactly this parallel comparison for casting rather than testing models sequentially. Whichever model wins each asset, generate 4 options per character sheet and prop reference, select the best, and lock it before any video generation: one production held 2 characters visually consistent across an entire 70-second film this way, with no LoRA fine-tuning required.

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.

— invideo's creative team