SETTINGS
Base Anima-Base v1.0. Also works on Anima-Turbo, JANIMA and the
all-in-one. Turbo is an additive distillation merged into Base, so
a LoRA trained against Base carries over; the reverse is not true.
Strength 1.0
Sampler er_sde Scheduler beta
CFG 4.5 Steps 30
Size 832x1216 portrait, or 1216x832
KNOWN ISSUE — AND IT IS NOT THE LORA
The reference prompts for this character describe a complete character sheet:
identity, full outfit, simple background. Anima answers with the booru
convention that goes with it — several views in one frame, chibi insets,
sometimes a small second figure.
This happens on the naked base model too, with nothing loaded.
Add this to your negative prompt and it goes away:
multiple views, reference sheet, character sheet, chibi, thought bubble,
2girls, multiple girls
Measured on paired seeds: 2 malformed images out of 6 without it, 0 out of 6
with it. No cost to pose or composition.
IF AN IMAGE COMES OUT MALFORMED, CHANGE THE SEED — NOT THE STRENGTH
Strength was tested blind at 0.5 / 0.7 / 0.9 / 1.1. None of the six
comparisons separated: the spread between the best and worst strength was
20 Elo points, while the spread WITHIN a single strength was 88 to 92. The
seed matters about four times more than the strength.
Some seeds fail at every strength — one produced a missing arm at 0.5, 0.9
and 1.1 alike. Rerolling costs one image; hunting for the right strength
costs an afternoon and fixes nothing.
COMING FROM ILLUSTRIOUS? THREE THINGS CHANGE
- CFG 5 -> 4.5, and Euler a -> er_sde. Anima is a rectified-flow DiT, not
SDXL; the ancestral samplers are not its regime.
- 18 steps is a Turbo-only budget. On Base or JANIMA, use 30.
- There is no clip skip. Anima encodes with a Qwen3 text encoder and an
adapter, not CLIP. Any clip-skip value is ignored.
THE REFERENCE PROMPT CONTRADICTS ITSELF
The short-hair prompt asks for "showing nape" together with "looking at
viewer" and "sideway glance". Nape means her back is turned; looking at
viewer means it is not. The model resolves it by drawing two figures.
Every sample here uses the prompt exactly as written. If you want a single
figure reliably, drop either "showing nape" or "looking at viewer".
HOW IT WAS MADE
Trained with kohya-ss/sd-scripts (anima_train_network) against Anima-Base
v1.0. unet-only, dim/alpha 4, AdamW8bit 1e-4, cosine with restarts, sigmoid
timestep sampling, 1024, 800 steps, bf16, on a single 8 GB card.
Text encoder not trained — measured, not assumed: the 196 Qwen3 LoRA modules
cost 1.1 GB of VRAM and bought no measurable loss difference at 400 steps.
Civitai's own Anima trainer ships ss_text_encoder_lr = 0.
Dataset: 38 published images, perceptually deduplicated (one pair was 0 bits
apart on a dHash and counted once). Hair length rebalanced with num_repeats
rather than by deleting images, because a held-out test showed each split
winning only where its own data was. The artist style tags are written INTO
the captions on purpose: what you leave out of a caption is what the trigger
absorbs.
Selection: every candidate was judged blind against the naked base model,
mixed in unlabelled.
WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
- The beret ornament is baked in rather than following the scene. None of the
public captions name it, so it learned one fixed motif.
- Character and art style are not fully separable — 36 of the 38 public images
use the same style stack, so there is nothing to contrast it against. A
separate style LoRA is published alongside; see "Milk (Anima)".
