Bring your EVE Online and other MMORPG characters to life with MidJourney

I’m an EVE Online player and was intrigued by MidJourney's recently announced new feature around character consistency, allowing you to use the same character in different scenes. Over the weekend, I decided to put it to a quick test using some of my EVE characters’ in-game portraits as a reference.

The outcome is quite impressive and fun (see some examples below). I thought others might like to explore this, and would likely come up with even better results, as my MidJourney prompting skills are rather rudimentary.

Of course, this can be used with any game using your character profile or even by simply taking screenshots of your favorite toon or NPC.

MidJourney

If you’re unfamiliar with MidJourney, it is a generative AI platform for creating images from natural language descriptions (prompts). MidJourney is a leader in that space and has entertained us with stunning images since mid-2022. Both free and paid versions are available. Join the platform’s Discord server to start exploring and learning more.

Character Consistency

The character consistency feature allows you to use an external image of a person or character as a reference, which lets you create images with the same character in different scenes, maintaining their appearance even as their clothes, hairstyle, pose, or environment change.

To use it, you only need to include a --cref <url> option in your prompt, the URL pointing to the image to use as a reference. Beyond this, there is also a --cw [0-100] option that lets you weigh how much of the character's outfit is used in the generation.

This YouTube video provides a very good overview, and several others as well as written articles have naturally emerged on the topic.

Note that safety mechanisms seem to have been put in place for actual people pictures, introducing alterations and preventing deep fakes. The feature actually works best with MidJourney-generated character images.

EVE Online

EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in a vast, science-fiction universe. Developed and published by CCP Games, EVE Online is renowned for its player-driven economy, intense player-versus-player combat, and complex social dynamics. Players pilot various spaceships and engage in activities such as mining, manufacturing, trading, exploration, and epic battles with other players or computer-controlled enemies.

EVE has many unique features that differentiate it from other similar games. This includes a single server shared by all players, creating encounters with potentially thousands of other players. The game economy is incredibly realistic, and almost every ship or module in the game is actually built by players through complex industrial workflows.

EVE has been around since 2003, making it one of the longest-running and most popular space MMORPGs. If you’re interested in exploring the EVE universe, use this link to sign up. This will give you a bonus of one million skill points to apply to your new character. Beware, though, as your life may never be the same.

And if you’re an EVE player and want to try this out, you can retrieve your character’s portrait using the following URL template: https://images.evetech.net/characters/<character_id>/portrait?size=1024
If you do not know your character ID, go to zKillboard and look yourself up; the value will be in your browser’s URL. If you’re not on zKill yet, it’s time to actually get a kill, or die at least once.

Character consistency examples

The examples below were literally created in a matter of minutes using very basic prompts like:

An EVE online character in the Jita 4–4 space trading station — cref <URL> — ar 16:9

A realistic photo of an Asian woman in a jumpsuit flying a spaceship; looking SAD; — cref <URL> — ar 16:9

An Eve Online character walking on a desert planet with a high-tech city on the horizon. Hyper realistic. — cref <URL>— ar 16:9

Here is one of my character's in-game portraits that I used as a reference:

And some of my favorite outputs (more here):

And a few other ones using this guy’s portrait (more here):

The End

I hope you found this entertaining and valuable. Maybe combining this with platforms like Kaiber is the next step to take (or OpenAI SORA when it comes out). Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and let me know what you come up with if you try this out.