Character Shot Planner

The narrowest bottleneck in character dataset work isn't the model, it's you typing ten variations of "standing in a room, medium shot" and getting the same photograph forty times. Character Shot Planner [Eclipse] plans the shots instead. Give it a character description, a scene and a count, and it returns a list of prompts, the matching seed list, stable shot IDs, and a readable plan - close, mid and wide candidates per image, one selected. It runs locally. No model, no account, no key, no network call.

What "planning" means here

For each requested shot the node draws three candidates - a close, a mid and a wide - with different poses and, in expression=random, different expressions. One candidate is selected and becomes the output prompt; plan keeps all three, including the two you skipped.

Selection of the camera is the clever bit. Every prompt's camera gets a permanent key built from distance + camera height + subject orientation + lens family + composition, and all three candidates reserve their keys. In the default stop_when=poses mode, those keys are never reused, so you can't get the same angle twice by accident - the node cycles less-used combinations instead. Cooldowns handle the soft version: pose_cooldown, expression_cooldown and camera_cooldown (defaults 3/3/2) exclude poses, expressions or camera families seen in the last N selected shots, including earlier batches.

The pools are editable JSON in ComfyUI_Eclipse/prompts/shot_planner/: camera.json, poses.json, expressions.json, rules.json. Add an entry, click Reload planner files on the node, and it's available - no restart for text edits. Out of the box you get 225 close, 270 mid and 225 wide camera keys, a big everyday/seated/lying pose pool, and a sexy category with 100 pose-only entries if that's what you need.

The controls you actually set

character_lock is required and goes first in every prompt - this is where Character Reference Pack's character_lock lands. Keep identity there and pose out of it; the planner supplies poses, and conflicting text is how you end up with forty identical standers. outfit_lock is optional wardrobe, scene is the shared background and lighting, and count is up to 100 selected shots per batch.

body_mode (any/seated/standing/lying) and pose_category (all/everyday/sports/sexy) filter the pose pool; selection picks the candidate policy (balanced spreads distances using project history), and choices overrides it with an exact comma-separated list like close, wide, mid. seed drives both candidate draws and each shot's generation seed.

The two you must understand before you generate anything:

• project names the history. Ledgers live at output/eclipse/shot_ledgers/<project-name-hash>.json and persist across restarts. Same project name = shared camera history.
• operation - preview plans against empty history and saves nothing; reserve writes all three candidates per shot before generation. Start with preview, tune, then switch. Existing batches only replay in reserve mode.

Outputs

prompts and seeds are parallel ComfyUI lists - keep them aligned, one image latent per list item, and use seeds for the sampler rather than reusing the planner seed. shot_ids gives you stable batch/shot/distance strings for filenames or captions. report is the human-readable plan; wire it to Show Any and read it before committing 40 renders. plan goes to Shot Plan Slice [Eclipse] when you want to split the batch across several generation branches.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI_Eclipse
pip install -r ComfyUI_Eclipse/requirements.txt

Or search ComfyUI_Eclipse in ComfyUI Manager and restart. Node category is 🌒 Eclipse/ Text.

Traps

Reservations are not completed images. A crashed or cancelled generation does not release them, so a retry uses the same plan in reserve mode rather than starting over. Changing any setting after reserving auto-creates a numbered variant (batch-001-2, batch-001-3) - the report shows the resolved ID, and getting back to the original means restoring the original settings. Pool-file edits need a new batch ID, because saved batches replay their snapshots of the pools.

And in the legacy stop_when=cameras mode, 225 sets is a combinatorial ceiling, not a promise. Cooldowns and prior reservations can exhaust it sooner, and the node stops with a yellow warning instead of half-filling a batch. If you're doing repeated large runs that way, set camera_cooldown=1; the no-repeat rule still holds.