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.
I dropped the nervous sample identified as the culprit last time, plus 5 others, and retrained the LoRA under otherwise identical conditions. The sweat drops on ep08 angry are gone, and as a bonus, ep06 produced the closed-mouth restrained anger that the previous training never managed to reproduce.
Training an Illustrious-XL LoRA on RunPod for around $1 by doing env setup on a $0.08/hr CPU Pod and renting the 4090 only for actual training. Network Volumes attach to both pods at the same time, so there's no idle GPU billing. Four sd-scripts gotchas hit on the way included.
WAI-Illustrious SDXL v17 tested on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI against v16 with the same seed. Hires fix now auto-corrects hands and feet, the four rating tags (general/sensitive/nsfw/explicit) still drive NSFW output, and v16-trained LoRAs mostly carry over — with one case where they don't.
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.
Using tori29umai’s LoRA to automatically split facial parts, results from batching 28 images, and a log of running into the limits when attempting finer hair separation
Went 0-for-13 trying to train an Illustrious-XL LoRA on a Mac Studio M1 Max 64GB. With help from multiple AI agents, pinpointed the root causes and finally succeeded on a RunPod RTX 4090. The full record: three fatal parameters and the sd-scripts trap.
An overview of Z-Image-Distilled, the distilled fast-inference variant of Z-Image, including how it compares with FLUX.1 Schnell, how it runs on an M1 Max 64GB machine, and LoRA compatibility.
