🐙 OctopussMixA — The Anima Era Begins! ✨
It finally happened — OctopussMix has officially crossed architectures 🚀
OctopussMixA is my first checkpoint built on the Anima base model by CircleStone Labs. The vibe you know and love from OctopussMixS v3 is now available on a completely different (and frankly very exciting) architecture 💫
🎨 How it was built
I distilled the style established in OctopussMixS v3 into a LoRA, then merged that LoRA directly into the Anima base. The result is a checkpoint that carries the same recognizable OctopussMix aesthetic — soft brushwork, characterful faces, dramatic lighting response — but now running on Anima's DiT architecture with Qwen3-0.6B as the text encoder 🧠
🌟 Why Anima?
Anima is a genuinely interesting frontier model and I wanted to see if the OctopussMix style could translate cleanly to a completely different generation paradigm. Spoiler: it can ✅
📌 Important notes
Different architecture means different prompting behavior — natural language plays a bigger role here than pure Danbooru tag stacking
Generation settings may differ from your Illustrious-based workflow
This is my first Anima merge so consider it experimental — feedback very welcome 💕
🙏 Credits
Big thanks to CircleStone Labs for the Anima base model. And as always, the OctopussMix community for the constant support and feedback 💖
🐙 Happy generating!
Description
🐙 OctopussMixA v2 — The Anime 2.5D Era ✨
This one's a big one. OctopussMixA v2 is finally here and I genuinely think it's the closest I've gotten to capturing the full OctopussMixS vibe on Anima 💫
🎨 What's new in v2?
The biggest upgrade is the dataset — v2 was distilled from over 1,000 images generated on OctopussMixS, giving the style LoRA way more depth and consistency than the v1 attempt. More data, more nuance, more of that recognizable OctopussMix character coming through 🚀
On top of that, the base wasn't just Anima this time. I merged Anima with a semi-realistic checkpoint first, then layered the distilled OctopussMixS style on top. The result is what I'd call a proper anime 2.5D experience — anime aesthetic with the painterly depth and skin response that makes the Illustrious version feel cinematic 🎬
🌟 Why this matters
v1 was a proof of concept — "can the OctopussMix style cross architectures?" Spoiler: yes. v2 is the actual answer to the question "can it cross architectures well?" 💪
This is the closest you can get to the OctopussMixS experience without actually running Illustrious. Same characterful faces, same dramatic lighting handling, same painterly soft brushwork — now on Anima's architecture with all its prompt flexibility 🧠
📌 Notes
Natural language prompting works really well here (Anima's strength)
Danbooru tags still function but you don't need to lean on them as heavily as on Illustrious
Semi-realistic skin response is noticeably stronger than v1
Still experimental — feedback is gold 💛
🐙 Happy generating!
— ducktopuss