Character Portrait

character-portrait — Locked Bust for Dialogue UI

This skill produces ONE polished character portrait — bust or shoulders-up framing, neutral or stylized background, designed to drop into a dialogue UI, character-select screen, or lore card. It is the opposite of concept-art: concept art explores; this skill commits.

The single biggest failure mode is inconsistency across a cast. Generating five party members one at a time without a locked anchor produces five images that look like they're from five different games — different lighting, different angle, different palette, different rendering style. This skill makes you write a locked anchor suffix the first time and re-use it verbatim for every subsequent portrait.

If the user is still exploring the look, this is the wrong skill — route to concept-art first, lock a direction, then come back here. The asset-strategy meta-router asks "Quick check — exploring the look (3-4 variants for art direction) or generating a final character portrait for dialogue UI?" to disambiguate.

When to use

• "Generate a portrait for the merchant NPC."
• "I need a character-select image for the four playable heroes."
• "Make a lore-card image of the king."
• "Add a VN-style dialogue portrait for Aria."
• The cast is locked and the visual direction is locked; you're producing finals.

When NOT to use

• The user is still exploring → concept-art.
• The user wants pixel art → pixel-art.
• The user wants a full-body 3D model → asset-strategy.
• The user wants 4+ animated expressions of the same character — generate one base portrait here, then use img2img with the base as referenceImageUrl for each expression.

Steps

1. Read or establish the locked anchor

Check .summer/portrait-anchor.md first.

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Read .summer/portrait-anchor.md

If it doesn't exist, this is the first portrait in the cast — you must define the anchor now. Ask the user (or infer from .summer/GameSoul.md):

• Framing: bust (chest up) or shoulders-up?
• Angle: straight-on, three-quarter left, three-quarter right?
• Lighting: soft front, dramatic side, rim-lit, golden-hour?
• Background: flat color, soft gradient, painterly blur, in-world environment?
• Rendering style: painterly, anime, semi-realistic, line-art-with-flat-color?

Write the anchor to .summer/portrait-anchor.md:

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## Portrait anchor (re-use verbatim for every cast member)

framing: bust, shoulders to crown of head visible
angle: three-quarter view, slight turn to character's left
lighting: soft warm key from upper right, cool fill from left, gentle rim
background: muted painterly gradient, dark teal to deep brown, no scene detail
style: semi-realistic painterly, soft edges, oil-painting feel

Note there is no aspect line in the anchor: framing is the aspectRatio argument of assets.generate_image, not prompt text. Bust framing reads fine square (1:1, the default); true portrait framing is aspectRatio: "3:4". Whichever you pick, use it for the whole cast — mixed aspect is as visible as mixed lighting.

Every subsequent portrait in this cast appends the anchor to the prompt verbatim. Do not edit the anchor mid-cast unless the user explicitly says "I want the new ones to look different."

2. Search for an existing portrait

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assets.search({ query: "<character name> portrait", assetType: "2d_image", scope: "all" })

Reuse beats regenerate. If the user wants to iterate on an existing one, pull its URL and pass it as referenceImageUrl for img2img.

3. Build the prompt — character + anchor

Pattern:

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<character description>. <anchor framing/angle/lighting/background/style>

The character description should include: identity (age, build, hair, distinctive features), expression, costume/equipment, any signature prop. Keep it under 60 words including the anchor.

4. Confirm and call

Generating Aria the witch portrait — 1 image (uses credits), model nano-banana-2, anchor locked from .summer/portrait-anchor.md. OK?

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assets.generate_image({
  prompt: "Aria, young witch, mid-twenties, pale skin, long black hair with silver streak, sharp green eyes, half-smile, wearing dark indigo robes with silver embroidery, raven on shoulder. <anchor verbatim>",
  model: "nano-banana-2",
  style: "none",
  aspectRatio: "<the cast's framing>"
})

style: "none" because the anchor's "semi-realistic painterly" already specifies style. Only cartoon and anime append anything to the prompt, and realistic / none append nothing — any other value is coerced to none. So the preset cannot "fight" a painterly anchor; it just does nothing either way, and every bit of the look has to be in the prompt.

There is no options object: shape and size are aspectRatio, width and height.

5. Import and wire into UI

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summer_import_from_url(
  url="<fileUrl from generation>",
  path="res://ui/portraits/aria.png"
)

For dialogue UI nodes, wire the texture into a TextureRect:

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summer_set_prop(
  scenePath="res://ui/dialogue.tscn",
  path="./DialogueBox/PortraitRect",
  key="texture",
  value="res://ui/portraits/aria.png"
)

texture is a property on the node, so this is summer_set_prop — which needs an explicit scenePath, a node path relative to that scene's root (./), and a key argument, not property. summer_set_resource_property is for reaching one level inside a resource the node already holds and requires all five of scenePath, nodePath, resourceProperty, subProperty, value.

For character-select with multiple portraits, name files consistently: aria.png, borin.png, cael.png, dara.png. Index-able from code via "res://ui/portraits/%s.png" % character_id.

6. Iterate (img2img) instead of regenerating from scratch

If the user wants the portrait tweaked ("smaller smile", "darker robes"), use img2img with the existing image as referenceImageUrl. Preserves identity and lighting.

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assets.generate_image({
  prompt: "<original prompt> with a smaller, more subtle smile",
  referenceImageUrl: "<previous fileUrl>",
  model: "nano-banana-2",
  style: "none"
})

Prompt patterns

Bad prompts (and why)

Anti-patterns

• No anchor file. Every cast member generated ad-hoc looks unrelated. Define the anchor on portrait #1, re-use for the rest of the cast.
• Editing the anchor mid-cast. If you change lighting from "warm key" to "dramatic side" halfway through, the cast splits visually. Either commit to the change and regenerate everyone, or stick with the anchor.
• Regenerating from scratch when img2img would do. Identity drifts every regen. Iterate via referenceImageUrl.
• Using the portrait as a 3D reference. Portraits have dramatic lighting, painterly backgrounds, and cropped framing — all of which corrupt 3D generation. For 3D, generate a separate clean white-bg full-body T-pose via asset-strategy.
• Expecting style to carry the look. Only cartoon and anime append anything; realistic and none append nothing and any other value is coerced to none. If the anchor names the style, "none" is correct — but the anchor text is doing all the work, not the preset.

Edge cases

• Character has a non-human silhouette (lizardfolk, demon, robot). The anchor still applies — framing, lighting, background, rendering style. Only the subject description changes. Verify the model can hold the silhouette under "bust framing" — some models default to humanoid.
• Player wants to swap costumes mid-game. Generate one base portrait per costume (aria_traveler.png, aria_robes.png, aria_armored.png) and switch by index. Use img2img from the base for consistency.
• Cast of 12+ characters. Anchor discipline gets harder as fatigue sets in. Print the anchor as a header in your generation script and don't write any prompt without it.
• User wants the portrait to "read at small size" (32×32 in a portrait list). That's pixel-art territory; route to pixel-art.

Without Summer Engine

In a session without Summer Engine tools (the assets profile; the summer-assets skill has the whole loop), do steps 1-4 and 6, and skip step 5 (import and UI wiring). Pass out with the person's folder so the PNG lands there (the summer-assets skill says how), and tell them the path.

Fallback (no MCP)

Print the prompt and the call:

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assets.generate_image({ prompt: "<character + anchor>", model: "nano-banana-2", style: "none" })

Tell the user to run via the Summer dashboard, then summer_import_from_url the result to res://ui/portraits/<name>.png.

Handoff

After the portrait is wired:

• More cast members → re-invoke this skill with the same anchor. Don't redefine.
• Expression variants → re-invoke with referenceImageUrl set to the base portrait.
• Pixel-art version of the same character → pixel-art.
• 3D model of the same character → asset-strategy (the portrait is NOT a usable 3D reference; generate a separate T-pose).
• Dialogue system wiring → scene-composition for the UI hierarchy.

See also

• concept-art — explore the look first if not yet locked.
• asset-strategy — meta-router and the 3D pipeline.
• scene-composition — wiring the portrait into a dialogue UI scene.
• summer_docs_read id reference/mcp-tools-reference — how to call assets.generate_image.

From a shell

No Summer MCP tools in this session? Run each one as a command; when summer --version is missing or below 4.0, use npx -y summer-engine@latest in place of summer. Fields are flags in kebab-case (--scene-path res://main.tscn) or one --input '<json>', and summer ops describe <op> prints the exact input. The summer-cli skill has the rest.