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Inline Visuals

Inline visuals is a feature introduced in version 0.35.0 that displays generated images directly within your scene feed. When you create images through the scene tools or director actions, they can now appear alongside the messages in your story, providing a more immersive visual experience.

Inline visuals example showing a scene illustration displayed above a narrator message

How It Works

When you generate an image using Talemate's visualization features, the image can be automatically attached to messages in your scene feed. The type of image and where it appears depends on how it was generated:

  • Scene illustrations appear with narrator messages or the most recent relevant message
  • Character portraits appear alongside character dialogue
  • Character cards can be attached to messages featuring that character

The images are displayed inline with the message text, or above the message for larger scene illustrations.

Generating Inline Visuals

There are several ways to generate images that appear in your scene feed:

Scene Tools

The quickest way to generate inline visuals is through the scene tools visualizer menu.

Scene tools visualizer menu

From this menu you can:

  • Visualize Scene (Card): Generate a cover image of the current scene
  • Visualize Scene (Background): Generate a purely environmental image
  • Visualize [Character] (Card): Generate a cover image portrait of a character
  • Visualize [Character] (Portrait): Generate a face-focused portrait
  • Visualize Moment (Illustration): Generate an image of the current moment in the story

Keyboard Modifiers

  • Hold ALT to generate only the prompt without creating an image
  • Hold CTRL to open a dialog where you can provide custom instructions

When you generate an image and the Auto-attach visuals option is enabled, the resulting image will automatically appear in your scene feed attached to the most relevant message.

Director Chat

You can also ask the Director to generate images through the director chat interface. Simply describe what you want to visualize, and if the Director has visual generation capabilities enabled, it will create the image and attach it to the conversation.

Director chat generating an image

For more information on using the Director chat, see the Director Chat documentation.

Autonomous Scene Direction

When using the autonomous scene direction feature (also new in 0.35.0), the Director can automatically generate images at appropriate moments during scene progression. These images appear in the scene feed just like manually generated ones.

Interacting with Inline Visuals

Once an image appears in your scene feed, you can interact with it in several ways.

Viewing and Managing

Click on any inline visual to open a context menu with options:

Inline visual context menu

  • View Image: Open a full-size view of the image (also available with Ctrl+click)
  • Open in Visual Library: View and manage the image in the Visual Library
  • Regenerate Illustration: Create a new version of the image (Shift+click shortcut)
  • Regenerate and Delete: Replace the current image with a new one (Alt+click shortcut)
  • Edit Illustration: Regenerate with custom editing instructions
  • Select illustration: Choose from existing scene illustrations
  • Clear Image: Remove the image from this message (keeps the image in your library)
  • Delete Image: Permanently remove the image

Quick Actions

For faster workflow, inline visuals support several keyboard shortcuts when clicking:

Action Shortcut
View full image Ctrl+click
Regenerate Shift+click
Regenerate and delete old Alt+click

Managing Portraits

For character portraits (avatars), you have additional options:

  • Auto-select portrait: Let the AI determine the best portrait for this message
  • Generate new portrait: Create a new portrait based on the current scene context
  • Select portrait: Choose from existing portraits for this character

Configuring Display Settings

You can customize how inline visuals appear through the Appearance Settings.

Appearance settings - Visuals tab

Visual Types

Configure settings independently for each type of visual:

  • Portrait: Character face images
  • Card: Character or scene cards
  • Scene Illustration: Full scene images

Render Cadence

Control when visuals are displayed:

Setting Behavior
Always Show on every message that has a visual attached
Never Never show visuals inline (images still saved in Visual Library)
On change Only show when the visual differs from the previous one (portraits only)

On Change Tracking

The "On change" cadence tracks portraits per character. So if character A speaks twice with the same portrait, only the first message shows the portrait. But character B speaking between them would show B's portrait normally.

Display Size

Control how large visuals appear:

Size Description
Small Compact display, minimal space usage
Medium Balanced size (default)
Big Large display; scene illustrations appear above messages

Auto-attach Visuals

The Auto-attach visuals toggle controls whether newly generated images are automatically attached to messages. When disabled, images go to the Visual Library but don't appear in the scene feed unless you manually attach them.

You can also toggle this setting quickly from the scene tools visualizer menu without opening the full settings panel.

Visual Types Explained

Understanding the different visual types helps you choose the right one for your needs:

Scene Illustration

Best for capturing a specific moment in the story. These images typically show the environment and characters together, depicting what's happening at a particular point in the narrative. Scene illustrations work well for important story beats or visually striking moments.

Scene Background

Environmental images without characters. Use these when you want to establish the setting or atmosphere without focusing on any particular character.

Scene Card

A portrait-oriented cover image for the scene. Good for establishing shots or title cards.

Character Card

Full-body or half-body portrait of a character in the current scene context. These are larger, more detailed character images.

Character Portrait

Face-focused images of characters. These are ideal for showing expressions and emotions during dialogue.

Requirements

To use inline visuals, you need:

  1. A configured Visualizer Agent with a working image generation backend
  2. A scene loaded with at least some content

The feature works with any of the supported image generation backends, including Google, ComfyUI, OpenAI, and others. See the Visualizer Agent documentation for setup instructions.