How to stop the labels on your reference sheet getting into the shot
Crop your reference sheets into clean plates before they are used, and have Vizard Agent confirm nothing survived the crop. A generator does not know which parts of the image are the character and which are the annotation, so arrows, swatch bars and label text all become things it can put in the shot.
What is the short version?
Your character sheet is a working document: four views, a colour strip, dashed measurement lines, a handful of labels. Handed to a generator as it stands, every bit of that counts as reference material. Vizard Agent strips each sheet back to the subject before anything is built from it.
- Give Vizard Agent the sheets and say plates must be clean.
- Let it crop and then check the crops.
- Look at the finish as well as the markings.
What do you need before you start?
The sheets you have, whatever state they are in. You do not need to clean them yourself — that is the job — but you do need to say which assets are current, because a folder usually contains several versions and the wrong one is as damaging as a dirty one.
Write down what must never appear. In the session behind this article the list was explicit: no text, no panel borders, no swatch bars, no dashed measurement lines, no node dots, no arrows, no sparkle stars, no glow rays. The brief called this the single largest source of re-shoots on the production, and it was right.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Give Vizard Agent the list and the register in one go. Which file is canon, and what that file must not contain, are two halves of the same instruction, and neither half is much use to anyone without the other.
Here are the reference sheets. Crop clean plates from them — no text, no panel borders, no swatch bars, no dashed lines, no arrows, no sparkles. Check nothing survived before using them.
That final clause is what turns a preference into a step. Cropping is easy to do approximately, and approximately is enough to leave a label edge in the frame.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It checks each supplied sheet against your rules before planning anything, crops the subject out of it, and then re-inspects the crops. That second inspection is the part that matters — a crop made to the right intent can still clip a swatch bar or half a word.
In that session the order was:
- Inspected each supplied reference against the stated material and cleanliness rules.
- Found the uploads included two versions of one character and no sheet at all for another.
- Prepared text-free crops of every character, prop and location.
- Verified that no labels or sheet graphics had survived the crops.
- Corrected a detail the references themselves got wrong, making a glossy nose and paw pads matte to match the stated material.
- Only then started building key frames to test consistency.
That fifth step is the less obvious half of the problem. Annotations are the visible contamination; the rendering style of the sheet — a glossy highlight, a drop shadow, a studio backdrop — leaks just as readily and is harder to notice.
What does the result look like?
Shots that contain your character and nothing from the paperwork. No stray arrow in the corner, no fragment of a label along an edge, and a finish that matches the material you specified rather than the way the sheet happened to be rendered.
You also end up with a reusable set. Clean plates cropped once serve every shot in the film and the next one, which is why doing it properly at the start is cheaper than fixing shots later.
When does this not work well?
When the annotation overlaps the subject. A dashed line drawn across a character, or a label sitting on a shoulder, cannot be cropped away — it has to be painted out, which is a different job and worth doing once rather than per shot.
A sheet that is mostly annotation is also a poor source. Four small views surrounded by panels give very little actual character at usable resolution, and a plate cropped from one will be soft.
And a reference with a strong lighting setup imposes that lighting. That is not contamination exactly, but it will follow your character into every shot, and it is worth deciding whether you want it.
How do you fix a result that came back wrong?
If something from the sheet appears in a shot, name it and say where. Vizard Agent goes back to the plate rather than editing the shot, because the same contamination is in every other shot generated from it.
If the material looks wrong rather than the markings, describe the finish you want. Matte against glossy, felt against plastic, painted against printed — those are the differences that come from the sheet's rendering rather than from your description.
If the character is inconsistent between shots, check which plate each used. Two versions of one character in a folder is the usual cause, and it looks like generator drift rather than a file mix-up.
How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?
Cropping the sheets yourself is entirely possible and takes ten minutes. The reason it goes wrong is that it is a boring step standing between you and the interesting part, so it gets done roughly and the consequences appear twenty shots later.
The useful difference is the verification pass. Looking at the crops afterwards — rather than at the sheets you meant to crop — is the step that catches the surviving label edge, and it is the one that never happens when you are in a hurry to start generating.
Common questions
Why does a label end up in the picture? Because the generator has no way to know it is annotation rather than content.
Can it clean the sheets for me? Yes. Vizard Agent crops clean plates and verifies them before use.
What if the label is over the character? That needs painting out. Vizard Agent will say when cropping is not enough.
How many views do I need? Enough to show the character from every angle your shots use. Vizard Agent will say what is missing.
Does the background of the sheet matter? Yes. Vizard Agent prefers a plain plate to one sitting on a styled backdrop.
What about the colour swatches? Give the values separately. Vizard Agent uses them without the strip being in shot.
Can it tell me which file is newest? Vizard Agent shows you what is in the folder; you say which one is canon.
Does a drop shadow matter? It can carry into the shot. Vizard Agent flags it when the finish is specified.
Can I reuse plates across projects? Yes, and that is the point of having Vizard Agent crop them properly once.
What if two sheets disagree? Vizard Agent asks which is right rather than quietly averaging the two.
Will cropping lose detail? A little. Vizard Agent gets far more out of a large sheet than a small one.
Can it make a missing sheet? It can generate one from an existing shot, and you should approve it as canon.
Does this apply to location references too? Yes. Vizard Agent cleans location plates too, and they carry annotation just as often.
How do I check the plates myself? Look at each one full size before any shot is generated. Vizard Agent will hand them over for that.