Ran WAI-Anima v1.0 with a custom character LoRA on an M1 Mac to see if 2- and 3-character compositions actually hold up. Notes on what breaks and what holds at different LoRA weights, with practical settings that stay stable.
Tested on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI: SetLatentNoiseMask silently fails on Anima + Anima-Turbo. LanPaint runs Example_26 in 32 min/image; Inpaint-CropAndStitch drops that to 2:31 for text inpaint and ~7 min for clothing replacement.
Tested on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI: Anima-Base v1.0 matches preview3-base in speed; WAI-Anima kana LoRA hits 22% on light prompts but 67% with hood+robe+embroidery added.
A verification log for converting color anime-style AI illustrations to manga-style monochrome. AI re-generation approaches lean to either color leakage or face drift, and pure deterministic local processing looks mechanical. Frames the next directions to try: putting a grayscale-only LoRA on Anima, and using See-through for part decomposition before mechanical composition.
With v3 captions kept as-is and only the training amount pushed up to Anima's official 12,000+ step recommendation, the direction hit rate went 100% at ep150-180, crashed to 0% at ep200, then partially recovered to 67% at ep227 — a non-monotonic curve. 600-720 exposures per training image is the sweet spot; over 800 triggers catastrophic forgetting. Learning rate 2e-5, ~11 hours / $10 of RunPod training plus a sweet-spot epoch scan.
Records of rewriting captions for the 53 training images for the WAI-Anima character LoRA retrain after side ponytail direction control failed last time. Wrote position information into natural language so Qwen3 TE could pick it up, and dropped the IL-era strategy of absorbing the entire hairstyle into the single 'kanachan' trigger by promoting hairstyle to independent Danbooru tags. Includes notes on year tag necessity, the bikini/nude swapped-caption discovery, and blazer color recognition drift.
Trained a WAI-Anima character LoRA on RunPod (AnimaLoraToolkit + sd-scripts) for $1.22, but at inference the side-ponytail direction won't shift with Danbooru tags or natural language — a directional bias from Anima base. Full verification record.
Tested WAI-Anima v1 on Windows + RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (8GB VRAM). Headless execution via ComfyUI API hit a tqdm OSError on startup, but launching ComfyUI normally generates a single image in 55 seconds. Includes the workaround and timing notes.
Tested WAI-Anima v1, Anima preview3-base, and WAI-Illustrious v160 side by side on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI with same seed/prompt. WAI-Anima inherits Anima's atmospheric lighting and natural running poses but still loses to WAI-Illustrious on tag control and character consistency. Includes i2i pipeline test (denoise 0.5), ~275s generation times, and how the Anima derivative ecosystem (WAI-Anima, CottonAnima, Kirazuri, RDBT) expanded in two months.
