Is it true that longer prompts are better?

according to Midjourney The official documentation does not necessarily say:

Prompts can be very simple. Single words (or even an emoji!) will produce an image. Very short prompts will rely heavily on Midjourney's default style, so a more descriptive prompt is better for a unique look. However, super-long prompts aren't always better. Concentrate on the main concepts you want to create.

But you will find that the prompts shared by the Chinese community seem to be very long. But as long as you observe carefully, or use translation software to check, you will find something magical:

1. Some words are misspelled. The reason is that a certain book does not support copying and pasting, which leads to many people using OCR prompts and then recognizing errors. Everyone is moving prompts, causing errors to be passed on. This can be regarded as a new era watermark.
2. There are some very repetitive words, such as 8k, UHD, and Ultra Quality. They all refer to the same thing, which is high definition. Adding too many of them will not have any cumulative effect.
3. There are many words that you don't even know why they are needed, but everyone seems to add them. For example, words like 8K, have you ever thought about whether this word is necessary? Is it useful? But in fact, these words are not officially recommended to use, and these words may even damage your graph (see the Midjourney official FAQ chapter for details).

If you read my tutorial, you will find that in the examples I talk about, many of the pictures can be described clearly with just a few prompts, and the generated pictures are not bad either.

Of course, I am not saying that you cannot write a very long prompt. If the content you generate is already very complex, then it’s okay to make it longer. But after writing it, ask yourself, is this necessary?

Pixel Games

When it comes to games, my favorite style is pixel style, which generally includes:

• 8-bit
• 16-bit
• 32-bit

You can all try it yourself. Here’s a prompt I wrote. Recently, Zelda released its latest game, Kingdom of Tears. I really like the setting of their Sky Island, so I used Midjourney to generate a 16-bit pixel art version:

Generate a Pokémon scene again:

These two prompts are very short, but very interesting and playable. You can play with them more:

3D Game - Scene

Due to space constraints, I cannot introduce all the prompts related to 3D games. I can only talk about some of the styles that I prefer. Also, I am not a professional 3D designer, so there may be mistakes. Please forgive me.

In 3D scene design, my favorite should be the pixel-style 3D miniature scene. I don’t know if it is called this name. I will write a prompt for everyone to see:

The left picture below is the Mars factory, and the right picture is the robotics laboratory:

3D Games - Characters

I won’t go into the main description, but will share the necessary elements of the 3D prompt:

I used the above prompt to generate Darth Vader and Stormtroopers. I think the Stormtroopers are pretty cute:

3D Games - Equipment

There are so many game equipments that I cannot introduce them all to you. I will only introduce some that I know about. First of all, the rings. Most of the game rings are signet rings.

Another common one is the equipment set (I'm not sure if this is correct in Chinese, it's called Item Collections in English), which is written like this:

The final result is as follows, but I am not very satisfied with the generated equipment set. Later I will introduce a trick to teach you how to gradually optimize the generated image:

Tip 10: Progressive Optimization with Controlled Variables

Many people compare AI-generated images to alchemy, which I think is very apt. Many times, I don’t know why, but if I add a little mysterious formula to the prompt, the image will be very different.

However, I think that although the process is very similar to alchemy, it does not mean that we need to rely on luck to make elixirs like the ancients. I think the best way to use Midjourney at present is: the control variable progressive optimization method.

Take the equipment set picture above as an example. I hope it generates equipment and arranges them one by one. The lightsaber effect is also very strange. First, let's check the prompts one by one:

As you can see from this table, we found three problems. The first one is the clay style problem, which is related to the last problem. My suggestion is:

1. Only one variable is modified at a time, leaving the rest unchanged.
2. After modifying one item and the effect meets your expectations, modify the next one.
3. In my experience, I would first modify the main content because it will sometimes affect the other variables.
4. If you want to make sure that the change is consistent, or that it meets the requirements rather than just happens to meet them, you can generate it again with the same prompt. However, since each generation costs money, this is optional.

OK, according to the above principles, let's modify our prompt and see what is generated. After adding different types of, there are more lightsabers, and the problem is solved:

Then we modified blender 3d and changed it to clay render. After I made the change, I found that the generated results (the four pictures on the left) seemed to have a little bit worse texture, so I tried to keep the effect of 3d blender plus oily (the four pictures in the middle), and use clay render plus oily together (the four pictures on the right).

I personally think that the best effect seems to be achieved by changing both (the four pictures on the right).

Compare the pictures generated by the initial prompt to the final one. Is the final picture better? So this tip mainly wants to tell you that you don’t have to copy the answer when writing a prompt. You also have the ability to write a good prompt yourself.

Game setting draft

In this chapter of the game, I will introduce a scene character setting draft that may be used. The prompt is as follows:

The final result is as follows: