Panel Haus The Drafting Table
The Drafting Table is an infinite board where you plan a comic before you make it. Drop in images, write notes, pull characters straight out of your World Vault, and wire them together. What you connect is what gets built.
How it works
Everything on the board is a node, and nodes connect. You might drop a reference image, add a character from your Vault, connect the two, and the frame you build from that connection knows who is in it and what it should look like. The board is a plan you can see, rather than a prompt you have to remember.
Boards are yours across the whole account rather than locked to one project, so a cast and a set of references you assemble once can feed more than one comic.
What you can place on it
| Node | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Image | Any picture you drop in, as a reference or a starting point |
| Note | A sticky note for dialogue, a beat, or a reminder |
| Vault character | A blueprint from your World Vault, live rather than copied |
| Style bundle | A look to apply to what you build |
| Sketch | A rough drawing to guide a composition |
| Frame | A single panel, built from whatever is wired into it |
| Page | Frames arranged into a comic page |
| Cover | A cover, with title lettering |
| Story skeleton | The story plan: a logline, the cast, and a beat for each page |
| Movie | Frames compiled in order into a video, with spoken dialogue |
Characters stay live
A character node does not copy your blueprint, it points at it. Edit that character once in the World Vault and every node casting them updates, everywhere, on every board. That is the difference between a reference you have to keep in sync by hand and one that simply stays right.
Smudge, the board assistant
Smudge is a chat that works on the board with you. Ask for a story arc, a set of frames, or a change to what is already there, and Smudge builds it as nodes you can see and edit rather than as something that happens invisibly.
By default Smudge does not spend on your behalf. Anything that would cost ink comes back as a chip you approve or skip, so nothing is generated until you say so.
Turning Autopilot on changes that deliberately. Smudge then acts without asking, up to 12 ink of generation per message, and stops asking for the small things so a long request can run start to finish. Overwriting a comic page you have already filled always asks, whichever way the switch is set.
What it costs
The board itself is free, on every plan. Placing nodes, connecting them, writing notes and arranging pages cost nothing.
Talking to Smudge costs ink per message. Smudge runs on two models, and they are priced differently.
| Message | Cost |
|---|---|
| Standard model, first 3 each day | Free, on every plan including free accounts |
| Standard model, after that | 1 ink per message |
| The more capable model | 2 ink per message, from the first one |
The free daily messages apply to the standard model only. Choosing the more capable one costs 2 ink straight away, and the free allowance resets at midnight UTC.
A message is charged once no matter how much work it turns into, so a request that takes Smudge several steps still costs one message. Generating images from what you built is billed separately, the same way generation is billed anywhere else.
One cost is worth calling out on its own: compiling a Movie node speaks the dialogue, and voice is charged per spoken line, so a long scene can cost far more than a single image. The compile button shows the price before it runs, and you can switch voices off to compile silently for free.