Sprite DX - Stage 1 - Character Generation

This week’s goal is to automate the Sprite DX pipeline—from a user prompt to an animated character that moves on its own.

I’ll be using ComfyUI to tie things together. It really speeds up the experimentation and keeps me from getting bogged down in the weeds.

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Stage 1: Character Reference Generation

At the start of the pipeline, Sprite DX needs a character reference. To keep style consistency, we’re hand-crafting a set of pixel art character sheets—like the one you see here. The characters are axis-aligned, with enough paddings around each one to keep things clean.

we mask out a few characters from the sheet.

Then, we use black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-Fill-dev to in-paint the masked areas.

Prompt: pixelated retro pixel art characters HD, gender: boy

After inpainting, we extract the new characters we generated.

So far, we’ve got:

This concludes Phase 1.

It's the first leg, but the results are super consistent—100% success rate!

Pro Tip: You can drag and drop this image into ComfyUI to get the full workflow imported.

Everything’s looking good so far—no major roadblocks. The inpainting method worked better than expected. Next up: feed this reference image into a video generation model to get a run-cycle animation.

Onward to Stage 2.

—Sprited Dev 🌱