Anima-2.9B

What v1 preview actually is

Regarding this version, perhaps it's more appropriate to name it v0.1, I guess? The released version was trained using Muon optimizer, on approximately 2.5 Epochs, but the true number is closer to 5 due to extensive use dynamic repeats on both new and old characters, with the dataset focus on post September 2025.

This version's main aim is to be more knowledgeable and be the most up-to-date anime model at release, v1 preview is not a "full" finetune (the whole original weights are frozen), and many pros and cons from the original Anima also carry over. By itself, v1 has its own strengths and weaknesses as well. It's not a model trained for aesthetic or with any RLHF. It's a model with a slight bias toward modern East-Asian anime style illustration, this is in fact intended.

It's also soon and easy to realize that 1.7M is not a very large number of samples (it's a decision I have to make at the time based on time and money constraint), and the new expanded layers has a lot of room for much, much more information. In other words, a lot more samples are needed, and that's why there is a 10M (pretraining non-anime focus) samples floating around. Unfortunately it's not a cheap or fast task to accomplish, and for that reason, your supports are greatly appreciated. Even without actual monetary support, it can still be achieved, just won't be quick, nor reaching the full vision/potential that I had for the final model.

Prompting guide

Finally, if you're struggling to prompt your desired results, here are several very important points for consideration:

- Characters should (think "must" in this case) be follow by their series/copyrights, (think of these like anchors, they always tag along) follow by their appearances (the more the better). Simple or very short prompt won't do as well.

- Don't use underscore except for score tags.

- Several metadata tags are very good to keep, I always recommend include highres and absurdres, following by the year tags (this has very strong influence on the generated image), score tags may not needed but you can still use them. You can throw away garbage such as "raytracing" or "4k" and "8k", these has never done anything and will just poison your output.

- Always recommend using artist tags, same as Anima-base, and you can mix them as I often do with proper prompt weighting, but don't expect it to be the same as sdxl.

- Prompt weighting and negative prompt are very important as well, this is something very easy to be underutilized.

- Prompting the background is also important if you want it to be more dynamic. Additionally, use keywords such as "cinematic composition" and "dynamic angle" can improve your image significantly.

Thank you once again, I will await your feedback.