What is the best AI image model for generating photorealistic character sheets in 2025?

For photorealistic character sheets in 2025, generate portraits in Recraft (skin pores, stubble, real-face imperfections), then build the 360° multi-angle sheet in Nano Banana Pro at 4K with four angles plus face and mid-angle close-ups. Better still, run them in parallel inside the invideo agent and pick the casting you want to hold across your film.

Treat character sheet generation as casting, not art. Inside the invideo agent, spin up a casting sub-agent and have it run the same character prompt through two image models simultaneously, then choose the face that holds. Across documented productions, that comparative pass costs little — image generation is cheap, and an entire short film locked 4 characters and 1 prop in 11 images total.

Recraft for photorealistic face portraits. Recraft renders the skin-level imperfections — pores, lines, stubble — that make AI faces read as actual faces rather than stock plastic. Use it for the headshot pass at 4K, before you build the turnaround.

Nano Banana Pro for the multi-angle character sheet. Nano Banana Pro has stronger prompt adherence than Nano Banana 2 and is the current pick for the turnaround sheet — four angles plus a face close-up and a mid-angle close-up, at 4K. Generate four variations of each sheet, lock the best, and feed it forward. Include close-up panels alongside the wides — small details (scars, accessories, an earpiece) drift across video models unless they're visible on the sheet.

GPT-Image-2 when you need precise instruction-following on multi-view layouts. For character sheets that need a specific pose grid or annotated views, GPT-Image-2's instruction-following holds the layout better than aesthetic-first models.

Remove props from the character's hands before generating the turnaround, or the prop will mutate across angles. Generate the prop on its own sheet.

For evolving characters — costume changes, trinkets that accumulate across scenes — build a separate sheet per beat. In one continuous-take production, the character picked up a new trinket in every city, which meant a fresh character sheet for every sequence.

When a single model can't fuse a complex multi-character arrangement (two characters in physical contact, a carry, a rope), hand-sketch the configuration on paper, upload the drawing to the invideo agent, and have it route the sketch into Nano Banana as the visual anchor — this unblocks shots that pure text prompts won't produce.

Once sheets are locked, they become the consistency spine for the rest of the film: the invideo agent attaches them to every downstream Seedance 2.0, Kling, or Veo generation, so the same face holds across shots without LoRA. In one 70-second short, two characters stayed consistent across every scene using only character sheets and persistent agent context — no fine-tuning, $750 total. When a continuity error appears later, ask the invideo agent to inspect the sheet rather than re-roll the shot — it identifies the exact panel with the error, fixes that panel, and the correction propagates forward.

These are the models worth running today — what wins depends on the face you're casting.

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