Trigger word: palmflame

Palm Flame puts a small, living flame in your character’s open hand, floating just above the palm, and lights the scene from it. The fire is the light source: it warms the palm, catches the face and clothes nearest to it, and throws a glow onto the surroundings, so it looks like part of the picture rather than an effect pasted on top.

It works with one or two characters, standing, sitting, kneeling or lying down, from the front, from behind, from above and from below, and in dark, dim or daylit scenes.

How to use

• Add palmflame to your prompt.

• Describe the hand: outstretched hand, hand up, hands up (one flame per palm), palm up.

• Flame colour: orange is the default. Add blue fire, white fire, green fire or purple fire for other colours.

• Lighting: the effect is strongest in dark or dim lighting scenes, where the flame is the main light. It still glows in daylight, just more subtly.

Recommended settings: strength 1.0 (model and CLIP). Lower it to about 0.8 if it pulls your style too far toward anime.

Training: Illustrious XL v2.0, 54 hand-reviewed images with hand-written captions, 2,000 steps, dim 32 / alpha 16.

Known limits (v1)

• Style: this version leans anime. Painterly and especially photographic prompts may drift toward a drawn look, and photographic flames can look like a gas jet. A rebalanced v2 with a wider style mix is planned.

• Lying poses: less consistent than standing or sitting ones, so expect to reroll more.

• Hands: check the fingers under the flame.

All characters are adults. Please keep it that way.

I wrote the limits section on purpose. About 30 of the 54 training images are anime, and Codex’s own notes say lying poses and keeping the prompted style are inconsistent. Stating that up front should head off “doesn’t do photos” reviews. If you’d rather not promise a v2 publicly, cut that sentence.

The strength advice comes from Codex’s recommended default of 1.0. The suggestion to drop to 0.8 is my guess, because we haven’t tested strengths yet.