Rendering Manhwa Panels

The ERNIE server at <host> isn't reachable: <error>. Start it and retry. (See the ernie-mcp README for exact startup commands.)

Do not attempt to "fix" ERNIE by calling other tools. The user starts the server themselves.

Step 2: Build the per-panel prompt

For each PanelBeat in script.panels, construct a prompt string by concatenating these parts in order (space-separated):

Part 1 — Medium and framing

A Korean manhwa panel in full color, vertical composition, <framing>.

Where <framing> is the panel's framing field verbatim.

Part 2 — Visible characters (only if any)

Filter panel.characters_in_panel to characters that actually exist in script.characters (skip any meta/unknown names). For each visible character, emit Name: visual_description. Join with | and wrap:

Characters visibly present (draw exactly as described): Kenji: Japanese man, late 50s... | Hana: Japanese girl, about 7... .

If characters_in_panel is empty, skip this part entirely.

Part 3 — Scene description

Append the panel's description field verbatim (stripped of leading/trailing whitespace).

Part 4 — Mood-to-lighting cue

Look up the panel's mood in this table and append the matching lighting string plus a period:

Part 5 — Dialogue bubble (only if dialogue is non-null)

A clean white speech bubble with black outline, English text reading exactly: "<dialogue>".

If speaker is also set AND appears in the visible character list, append Bubble points toward <speaker name>.

Part 6 — Caption box (only if caption is non-null)

A narration caption box with dark background and white English text reading exactly: "<caption>".

Part 7 — Style suffix (always)

Art style: <script.style>. Sharp cel-shading, thick digital linework, clean outlines, professional webtoon quality.

Step 3: Pick the panel size from framing

ERNIE only accepts specific sizes. Pick (width, height) for each panel:

Lowercase the framing string before matching. These three sizes are all in ERNIE's allowed set.

Step 4: Generate each panel

For each panel idx, call:

mcp__ernie__ernie_generate(
    prompt=<built prompt from Step 2>,
    width=<width from Step 3>,
    height=<height from Step 3>,
    seed=42 + idx,
    steps=8,
)

Seeding with 42 + idx keeps re-runs reproducible. The response includes a path key — the PNG is already on disk. Copy or move it to the chapter's output folder as <out_dir>/panels/panel_<NN>.png where <NN> is zero-padded two digits (panel_00.png, panel_01.png, ...).

Also write the built prompt to <out_dir>/panels/panel_<NN>.prompt.txt so the user can reproduce or tweak.

Render panels sequentially, not in parallel — the ERNIE server is single-GPU and will queue anyway, and sequential output lets you give the user incremental progress updates ("panel 7 of 30 done").

Error handling inside the loop

If ernie_generate raises:

1. Retry the same panel once with the same args.
2. If it fails again, log which panel failed, skip it, and continue. Do NOT abort the chapter.
3. After all panels attempted, report any gaps in the final summary.

Step 5: Compose the chapter

Once all panels are saved, run the bundled composition script:

python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/rendering-manhwa-panels/scripts/compose_chapter.py \
  --panels-dir "<out_dir>/panels" \
  --out "<out_dir>/chapter.png" \
  --title "<script.title>"

If that command fails with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PIL', retry with uv (which self-installs Pillow in an ephemeral env):

uv run --with pillow python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/rendering-manhwa-panels/scripts/compose_chapter.py \
  --panels-dir "<out_dir>/panels" \
  --out "<out_dir>/chapter.png" \
  --title "<script.title>"

If uv also isn't available, tell the user:

Pillow (the Python imaging library) isn't installed. Either run pip install Pillow or install uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) and retry. All the individual panels are saved in <out_dir>/panels/ regardless.

Step 6: Report

Summarize to the user:

• Panels successfully rendered vs requested
• Any skipped panels and their indices
• Absolute path to chapter.png
• Total wall-clock time
• How to re-render from the saved script.json later

Notes on character consistency

ERNIE cannot "remember" a character between separate generations. Consistency comes entirely from the visual description you inject into every panel prompt (Part 2 above). That's why the writing-manhwa-scripts skill insists on dense casting sheets — and why you must NOT paraphrase them during rendering.