AI Canvas Populator
The AI Canvas Populator reads your manuscript and Story Bible, then automatically assigns characters, settings, and worldbuilding entries to every scene based on what appears in the prose. This saves you from manually tagging each scene and ensures your Canvas views reflect the actual content of your story.
How It Works
- Click the AI Populate button (sparkles icon) in the Canvas toolbar
- A confirmation modal opens — click Populate to start
- The AI analyzes every scene that has written content
- It matches mentions of characters, settings, and worldbuilding entries from your Story Bible
- Entities are assigned to scenes where they appear
- A results modal shows what was assigned
Results
After processing, the modal displays:
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Scenes analyzed | Number of scenes with content that were scanned |
| Characters assigned | Total character–scene links created |
| Settings assigned | Total setting–scene links created |
| Worldbuilding assigned | Total worldbuilding–scene links created |
All Canvas views update immediately — the Corkboard shows new edges, the Matrix reflects updated groupings, the Timeline shows new entity pills, and so on.
When to Use It
Run the Populator when:
- You've written several scenes and haven't tagged them with entities yet
- You've added new characters or settings to the Story Bible and want to backfill connections
- You've restructured or rewritten scenes and entity assignments are out of date
The Populator works best when your Story Bible is well-populated. The AI can only match entities it knows about — so add characters, settings, and worldbuilding entries to the Story Bible before running it.
The Populator adds entity assignments — it does not remove existing ones. If a character was previously assigned to a scene but no longer appears in the prose, the assignment remains. You can manually remove assignments from the scene detail view.