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.
