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.