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 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. Neither half is much use without the other. End by asking it to check nothing survived, because that turns a preference into a step. Cropping is easy to do approximately, and approximately leaves a label edge in the frame.
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.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It checks each supplied sheet against your rules before planning anything, crops the subject out, then re-inspects the crops, because a crop made to the right intent can still clip a swatch bar or half a word. The brief listed what must never appear: text, panel borders, swatch bars, dashed measurement lines, node dots, arrows, sparkle stars and glow rays. In the session behind this article it:
- 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.
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, can't be cropped away. It has to be painted out, which is a different job. A sheet that's mostly annotation is also a poor source, because a plate cropped from four small views will be soft.
Common questions
Why does a label end up in the picture? The generator can't tell annotation from content, so Vizard Agent crops it out first.
What if the label is over the character? That needs painting out. Vizard Agent will say when cropping is not enough.
What if two sheets disagree? Vizard Agent asks which is right rather than quietly averaging the two.