Rules before pictures
What makes a world feel like a place is consistency of rules, not quantity of assets. One sun. One architectural logic. One palette. One sense of how big a person is against a door, held across every image anybody makes in it.
Generated one image at a time, those rules drift immediately — every prompt is an opportunity to answer them slightly differently, and nobody answers them identically twice. Twenty images in, the world has three suns and two scales, and the problem is invisible until somebody lays them out together.
Held as references in a graph, the rules are answered once and inherited. That is the whole technique, and it is the difference between a world and a mood board.
A structure that scales
Establish the rules as nodes
Light, palette, material vocabulary and scale reference each become a node other work draws from. Four nodes, decided deliberately, before anything pretty exists.
Build locations from them
Each place inherits the rules and adds only what makes it that place. What is shared stays shared, which means fixing the light fixes every location at once.
Populate
Characters, props and vehicles connect to the same rule nodes, so a costume belongs to the world rather than to one image, and a vehicle is lit by the same sun as the street it is on.
Revise the rule, not the output
Deciding the sun is lower changes one node and re-runs what depends on it. That is the payoff for the setup, and it arrives around the fifteenth image.
Hand it to someone else
A collaborator opens the graph and builds inside the rules rather than approximating them from a mood board and a conversation they were not in.
Which rules are worth encoding
Not everything should be a node. These four almost always should.
- Light
- Time of day, key direction, quality. The single biggest driver of whether two images feel like the same world, and the one most often left implicit.
- Palette
- Not a colour scheme so much as a restriction. Worlds read as coherent largely because of what is absent from them.
- Material vocabulary
- What things are made of here. Concrete and brass is a different world from carbon and glass, even at identical light.
- Scale reference
- How big a person is against a door, a vehicle, a building. The rule that breaks most invisibly and ruins the most images when it does.
Sharing a world
A graph built this way can be published as a workflow — the structure, without your final frames — so a collaborator, a freelancer or a licensee can build inside the same rules rather than approximating them.
For a franchise or a long-running production, that is closer to a style guide that executes than to a document somebody has to read and remember. The rules are not advice; they are inputs.
Questions
How many rule nodes is too many?
If you cannot hold the list in your head, the world is over-specified and contributors will start ignoring parts of it. Four to six is usually right; the discipline is in what you leave out.
Can two people build in the same world at once?
Each can work from the same published structure today. Simultaneous editing of one graph is on the roadmap under Now.
Does this replace an art bible?
It executes one. The bible still explains why the rules are what they are, which a node cannot; the graph enforces them, which a document cannot.