u/WolverineAwkward8867

Hey everyone — I’ve been running Imagine with the same workflow for a while, and after the recent [August / 1.5] update the results took a big step backward for me.

I’m seeing a pretty consistent set of issues: the model often doesn’t preserve character consistency from the uploaded reference. The face ends up waxy/plastic, skin looks lifeless, and I’m getting artifacts like a “half hat”/missing or wrong headwear even when the reference image clearly has the hat. These aren’t minor flaws—this makes the output feel fundamentally unreliable and, in practice, my workflow is basically usable again only before the update.

I also want to say I’m not alone: I’ve been reading other people’s comments and I’m seeing similar reports/patterns (same kind of face realism regression and reference not being respected as it used to be).

Has anyone found a real workaround or settings change that restores better face/character locking? And does anyone know if the team is aware of this update regression and working on a fix—or whether there’s any way to downgrade back to the previous behavior?

If you’ve posted examples or settings that improved things, I’d really appreciate a link or a quick summary.

For the past week or so, I’ve also been seeing a clear drop in Grok video generation quality. With the same prompts I used to get much more realistic, better prompt-adherent results—but now it’s noticeably worse across the board.

The prompt adherence has degraded: text/lettering is misrendered (letters shift and “fall apart”), and facial detail/skin texture looks significantly worse than it used to. Overall realism is down enough that the outputs are basically not acceptable for my use-case, and at this point it feels like rapid credit burn.

The most striking issue: my reference frame is pixel-perfect with detailed skin texture, individual eyelashes, eyebrows. But the generated video renders the face like watercolor/felt-tip—all that detail is destroyed and replaced with a flat, abstracted texture. It's not just 'lower quality'—it's actively simplifying and losing input detail.

I also tried adjusting prompts (adding back the earlier level of detail and using different prompt styles), but I still can’t get anywhere close to the realism.

Hope this is temporary and they’re actively working on fixing it.

Have other people noticed a similar quality drop? And what do you all think is causing it—an actual model/pipeline change on the server side, or something in how the generator handles prompts/reference images/lettering and facial detail now?