Chapter 32 · The Project
The Lookbook
The Lookbook is the Story Bible with the lights on. It takes the characters and locations you have already described and turns each one into a visual board, drawn from the words you wrote about them. It costs image credits, it overwrites rather than accumulates, and it is worth understanding before you spend your first one.
What the Lookbook is
One Lookbook per project, built entirely from that project's Story Bible. It invents nothing about your cast: an entry with an empty summary and no details produces a generic image, because a generic description is all it was handed. The quality of a board is the quality of the entry behind it, which is the whole design.
Boards are private to you. The images live outside the public media area and are served through an authenticated route that checks you own the project, so a collaborator on a shared document cannot see them, and neither can anyone with the image's address.
Opening it
Open a project and look for the Lookbook card, described as "Visual references
for your cast and world". It sits in step 1, Develop, and again in step 4,
Deliver: the same page either way, offered where you are most likely to want it.
The address is /project/<id>/lookbook, and the line at the top of the page walks
back through Studio and Story Bible.
With nothing to draw yet, the page says "No characters or locations in the Story Bible yet" and points you at the Story Bible to add some or sync them from your script. Chapter 28 covers the two ways to fill it from pages you have already written.
What appears on a board
Every Story Bible entry of kind Character or Location gets a board, ordered by kind and then by name. Item / Prop, Faction / Group and Note entries never appear here. If somebody is missing from the Lookbook, their kind is the first thing to check on the Story Bible page.
| On the card | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The image, or a 🎭 / 🏔 placeholder | The generated portrait, if one exists yet. |
| The kind label and the name | The entry's kind and canonical name. |
| A short description | The first 180 characters of the entry's summary. |
| Up to four detail rows | The first four custom fields, label and value. |
| Generate or Regenerate | Which one shows depends on whether that entry already has an image. |
The card is a trimmed view. The generator reads more of the entry than the card shows, so a long summary is not wasted just because the board cuts it off at 180 characters.
The house style field
At the top of the page, House style is a single text field that applies to every board you generate from then on. Leave it empty and Storskarvia uses its own default: cinematic concept art, painterly, moody natural light, muted palette, no text, no watermark. Type your own and it replaces that default outright, so include the parts you still want. "No text, no watermark" is worth carrying over.
The field is remembered by your browser, not by your account. It follows you between projects on the same machine, and a different computer or a private window starts empty. Nobody else sees it.
Generating an image
Press Generate on a card. The button changes to Drawing… while the image is made, which takes a while: this is a real image model, not a thumbnail. When it lands, the picture replaces the placeholder and the button becomes Regenerate.
Nothing generates on its own. No board is drawn when you open the page, when you add an entry, or when you edit one. Every image is one deliberate press, because every attempt costs a credit and, behind the scenes, real money.
What is actually sent
The description handed to the image service is assembled from that one entry, in this order:
- A framing line: Character portrait of Name, waist-up for a character, Establishing shot of Name for a location.
- The first 400 characters of the entry's summary.
- The first six details, as Label: value, with each value trimmed at 80 characters.
- Your house style, or the default if you left it empty.
The whole thing is capped at 1,000 characters, so a very long summary crowds out the details that follow it. Put the description you actually want drawn near the front. Nothing else travels: not your manuscript, not your other entries, not your notes. Images are generated by xAI, listed in the privacy policy along with everything else Storskarvia sends outside itself.
Aliases are not sent. They are matching machinery for your draft rather than description, so a character known as "Cat" is drawn from the canonical name and the fields. Chapter 27 covers what fields are good for, and tightening them is the single most effective thing you can do to a board.
Image credits
When the image lane is on, the line under the heading reads "N of M image credits left this month". One press is one credit, whether the board is new or a fourth attempt at an old one.
| Free | Pro | Studio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image credits per month | 3 | 25 | 100 |
They reset every 30 days from your own start date rather than on the first of the month, and they are a separate pool from AI checks: generating portraits never eats into your fact-checks. A subscription whose renewal payment has failed runs on free-tier limits until the payment is fixed, so three credits where you expected twenty-five is worth checking your billing over. Part IX covers allowances and billing in full.
When it will not draw
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| The button reads Out of credits, after a message naming your plan | The month's credits are spent. Nothing was generated and nothing was charged beyond the credits you already used. |
| The button reads Failed — retry | Everything else. Nothing was saved, and if a credit had already been taken it is given back. |
| A note that the image lane "isn't switched on yet", with the buttons disabled | Image generation is off for that installation. The boards still render as text. |
"Failed — retry" is one label over several causes, so it is worth knowing the three likely ones:
- Your email is not verified. Generation is one of the actions held back until you confirm your address. Resend the link from your studio, confirm, and try again.
- Too many in an hour. Generation is limited to ten attempts an hour from one connection. Wait, then carry on. No credit is spent on a request that is turned away this way.
- The image service refused or timed out. Retrying is usually enough. Your credit was returned, so a retry costs one credit rather than two.
Keeping, replacing, and deleting
Each entry holds exactly one image. Regenerating overwrites it where it stands. There is no version history for portraits, no undo, and the project download (.zip) contains your documents rather than your boards. If a board is good, save the image out of your browser before you press Regenerate.
Deletion runs the other way, deliberately. Deleting a Story Bible entry deletes its portrait from the server, and deleting the project deletes every portrait in it. A face somebody asked to be rid of does not linger on disk after the entry is gone.
The loop that makes it worth doing
Set the house style once. Generate one board, look at what came back, and treat it as a reading of your entry rather than a picture: the parts that are wrong are usually the parts your Story Bible left vague. Tighten the summary and the first few details, then regenerate. Three deliberate passes on an entry that matters beat spending a month's credits on first attempts.
That loop is why the Lookbook sits next to Chapter 26 rather than in the export part of the book. It draws what you wrote, and the honest version of that is that it also shows you what you did not.
Updated 2026-09-08 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?