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[cw: lots of furry images. nothing involving nudity in any sense but the Donald Duck or swimsuit sense, but probably not something you'd want to explain to your boss]
It depends a lot on what you're aiming for. It's possible to get text-only prompts that retain fairly good consistency of a character. Some of that's because the character itself is pretty 'standard', although they also have a number of potential faults (eg, border collie with a floppy ear and a spot around one eye seems easy, but a lot of models struggle with the "my left or your left" problem). And these can require pretty serious levels of detail and description, much of which wouldn't be obvious to non-artists.
If you've already got a single piece with the character and want a second one in an entirely different context, tools with more semantic understanding focused around transfer like Qwen Image Edit, Nano Banana, and Whisk can do that surprisingly well (albeit generally on the cloud and censored: afaik, only Qwen Image Edit has a local mode). I'd expect some multimodal LLMs could do something similar, but I've only really tried GLM-4.6V for local multimode and never got anything particularly exciting from it.
For one-offs with more specific or complex markings or fur patterns, especially around the face or hands/paws, you're usually going to see a lot of inpainting. The threshold where that becomes necessary can be surprisingly low: this guy seems trivial at first glance, but since it's not supposed to have a few tells from real maned wolves that's often something he had to tweak aggressively, and the four markings on the forehead are really not something most AIgen wants to do as part of a facial structure, so he'd often be loading up krita to help do inpainting. It's still not 'real' artwork, but it can get fuzzier on the edges.
If you plan to reuse the character, doing a few works with inpainting, traditional media, 3d modeling software, or some combination of the above, then building a LoRA tends to be the most effective. A good LoRA takes a lot of effort, but it can be done with a surprisingly small number of reference images and maintain a lot of detail or handle very strange layouts.
For an example, I'll use uverage. He's an avali-wolf hybrid, so he's got a lot of unusual features (the four ears are intentional, the ring marks around the ears and thighs are not standard, and his tail is probably derived from another VRchat species) and while avali are popular enough (6k e621 images) as fictional species go enough he's probably not the first avali-wolf, there's not exactly a surfeit of non-AI training data that matches what conclusion this particular aiGenner came up with. Yet the LoRA can carry markings and physical characteristics across styles, perceived 'medium', or even transfer markings to gender or to other species.
It's far from perfect. Notably, the arm feathers and crest tend to come and go randomly, and the LoRA seems to be messing with the finger-and-toes count. That might be an intentional stylistic decision, but probably not. And LoRAs do have costs: poorly trained LoRA can degrade image quality, and they seldom scale above three or four LoRA in one generation (either text2img or inpainting) before the models tend to just go nuts. But it's the sort of thing that's practically doable at small scales by individuals without too autistic a level of focus.
That said, I will caveat that enough furries are faceblind enough, or otherwise tend to identify characters more by mood, dress (as little as that might be), and large high-contrast markings. I don't know how well the same approach would transfer to realistic or even anime-like humans, especially for an audience with better perception about microexpression or sensitivity to smaller errors; the few examples I'm familiar with tend to be side characters in content I'm not gonna link here.
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