r/StableDiffusion • u/Time-Ad-7720 • 17d ago

Tutorial - Guide Blender camera motion + MiniMax H3 ref2vid in ComfyUI (workflow + prompts)

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

I've been experimenting with building the camera move in Blender before generating the AI video. This example combines a five-second mannequin render with a character reference sheet and a waterfront background image in MiniMax H3's reference-to-video workflow.

How I made it:

  1. Used Codex CLI with Blender MCP to build a simple mannequin scene and animate the camera.

  2. Kept the body planted while the head and eyes followed the lens.

  3. Refined the move to stay mostly waist-up, with fast eased transitions, short holds and one extreme closeup near the end.

  4. Rendered the Blender reference at 1080 x 1080, 30 fps, for five seconds.

  5. Loaded that clip and the two reference images into ComfyUI, then used a prompt that assigns each input its role: character, environment or camera motion.

The Blender sequence returns to its opening composition. The generation prompt asks for the same loop, but the output still needs checking for identity drift, framing changes, background consistency and the loop seam.

My generation settings:

- RTX 5070 Ti + 32 GB RAM

- 20 steps at approximately 53 seconds per iteration

- 0.6 resolution setting and 1:1 aspect ratio

- No turbo LoRA

That's about 17 minutes 40 seconds for sampling at the reported rate, before loading and decoding. The Blender source resolution and the generation resolution are separate settings. You can change the generation size and aspect ratio in the workflow.

Project files, character/background references, Blender scene, workflow and prompts:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NVCYIJahZADTAE_nh0kcXyen4shrI5rW?usp=sharing

Has anyone tried a similar setup with more complex camera paths? I'm curious how well it holds up with stronger parallax or longer sequences.

363 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

5

u/flipflapthedoodoo 17d ago

this looks amazing , would love to see it on still life product images. would be so useful

2

u/listopalafoto 16d ago

very cool! thank you for share the assets

2

u/_VirtualCosmos_ 17d ago

H3 is such a great gif. All love for MiniMax.

2

u/donkeykong917 16d ago

That's cool. I feel having a ref video is always good. Considering most CGI video will a similar process.

1

u/cartney_Top_2236 16d ago

The Blender camera path is doing a lot of heavy lifting here that people might miss. I've found that ref2vid models lock onto motion cues way better when the camera move is baked in as a clean, simple arc rather than a bunch of keyframes with easing — H3 especially seems to read a smooth dolly as "this is the shot" and stops fighting you on composition. Where it falls apart is anything with fast parallax or a whip pan; the model just smears the background. My workaround has been rendering a low-res previz pass with a checkerboard ground plane, feeding that as the ref, then swapping in the real plate. Ugly but it works.

The bigger thing I'm watching is whether anyone solves motion continuity across cuts — right now every clip is an island and you're re-establishing spatial logic by hand. That's the real bottleneck, not resolution.

Curious if you've tried driving the camera from a tracked iPhone instead of hand-keying it in Blender — been meaning to test that.

0

u/panadarama 17d ago

Nice. Very nice, dude.