Soul ID Explained

Soul ID is the name we give to the practice the consistency guides teach: identity lives in assets you own, not in prompts you retype. A character has a Soul ID when anyone on the team can produce a new image of them without guessing — because the face of record and the rules for deriving from it are written down.

The three parts

• Anchor set — the canonical sheet: frontal, three-quarter, full-body portraits at high fidelity. The face of record.
• Descriptor block — the frozen identity paragraph, pasted verbatim into every brief. Never paraphrased, versioned like code.
• Derivation rules — how new images may legally be made: reference edit from anchors; masked inpaint for repairs; never a text-only regeneration of the face.

How it flows through the tools

• Soul Moodboard fuses anchor references with style references into one visual direction for the project.
• Nano Banana 2 / GPT Image 2 reference editing moves the anchored face into new scenes — identity rides with the pixels.
• H3 Image Editor (REF2VA) regenerates a scene while preserving identity and geometry, for heavier recontextualization.
• Inpaint repairs drifted regions while the mask protects approved pixels.
• Relight adapts anchors to scene lighting without touching facial structure.
• Character Animator carries identity through motion driven by a performance clip.
• Image Upscale finishes selects for delivery.

What Soul ID is not

• Not a magic one-click clone — the anchor set still needs to be built deliberately.
• Not seed locking — seeds die at every route, model, and resolution change.
• Not style transfer — style is how the world renders; identity is who is standing in it. They are separate layers.

Setting one up takes ten minutes

1. 01Pick or produce the anchor portraits (photo-to-persona flow works for real faces).
2. 02Write the descriptor block; save it next to the images.
3. 03Test derivation: three scenes via reference edit, audited against the anchors.
4. 04Freeze v1. Assets plus descriptor live in one folder; nothing generates outside the rules.

The same pattern scales beyond people: give a location an anchor set and derivation rules and you have Soul ID for sets — which is exactly what sequence work demands (see Characters and Locations Across Shots).