Character swap vs face swap: what's the difference?

Face swap is about identity

In a face swap, the reference supplies a face and the model puts that face on you. Your movement, expression and head angle drive the output, so the person on screen moves like you while the face is someone else's. The rest of the frame stays your room, your clothes and your body.

Character swap is about the whole look

People say character swap when they mean a transformation bigger than the face: turning a person into a character, a cartoon, an outfit, a scene. That is not one operation. It can mean replacing the face, restyling the whole image, or changing what someone is wearing, and each one needs a different reference.

That is why the phrase is slippery. A stream overlay that turns someone into an animated character, an outfit try-on for a shop and a face swap for a themed night are often filed under the same search term, but they ask for different transformations. This studio splits them explicitly into three modes rather than one ambiguous button.

The three modes, mapped

The studio separates those jobs into three modes. All three run on the same LiveFaceSwap V1 model and are billed at the same 0.6 credits per live second; what changes is the reference you give the model and therefore what it preserves.

• Face Swap: identity. The reference is a face; your pose and expression survive, the face does not.
• Restyle: the whole camera view is restyled — animation, painting, a graphic look — while the motion underneath stays yours.
• Try-On: an outfit follows the body as it moves, useful for styling, streams and product demos.

What stays the same

In every mode the live camera keeps driving the output. That is what separates these from a photo edit: your movement is the performance. If you want a still image, this is the wrong tool; if you want the transformation to react to you, it is the right one.

Choosing the right mode

Start from what you want to keep. Keep the identity and change nothing else: Face Swap. Keep yourself and change the visual style: Restyle. Keep yourself and change the clothes: Try-On. If you want a character that changes both face and outfit, pick the mode that carries the change you care about most and accept that the other stays as it is.

The reference decides the result more than the label on the button. A face photo in Face Swap, a style image in Restyle and an outfit image in Try-On are the three intended pairings. Using the wrong kind of image is the most common way to get output that seems to ignore what you wanted.