Reference Lock: How Identity Drift Kills an AI Influencer

Drift is a recognition tax

Followers forgive a new outfit. They do not forgive a new nose. Reference-to-image at medium-high is the lock. The glossary term is /glossary/reference-lock. This guide is the long form.

This page is the Pixogen-specific version of the topic. Credit numbers below match the generate button in the studio as of August 2026. If a model ships a new badge, we update the routing note here within a day — that is the newsroom rule, not a landing-page rewrite.

Credit math

Every remade face wastes the previous week of stills. Count that, not just the 1-credit reroll.

Credits never expire. Failed jobs refund automatically. Do not budget as if a missed render is gone. Packs start at 200 credits for $19.99; a launch week for a persona is usually cheaper than one stock-license bundle.

Pipeline on Pixogen

One canonical file in a folder named identity. Every job starts there.

Internal links that belong on this job: the matching tool landing, the pipeline hub, and one glossary term. Do not leave a guide live without those three. Related reading lives in Learn and Academy, not in a footer dump.

Model routing

Flow 1 is enough for lock. Do not hop engines mid-series.

If you are choosing an engine for the first time, open /models/compare. Portraits, motion, lipsync and photoreal each have a different default. Wan 3.0 is the motion hero as of this writing; Nano Banana 2 still wins in-image text.

Mistakes that waste credits

• New seed every post.
• Two canonical files “just in case”.

Publish checklist

1. Lock identity before you batch.
2. Write the credit total on the brief so the client sees the number before the job.
3. Export clean — no watermark — then brand in your editor.
4. Ping the changelog if this guide rode a model drop.

See /ai-character-generator, /academy/consistent-characters-reference-guide.