Hello everyone,

It’s been a while! To be honest, I’ve been kinda stuck on Bleach lately, but fear not — I’ll also keep working on all of your requests.

Today’s models took quite some time because I wasn’t really satisfied with the results. I ended up rolling back my training settings to the good old Kohya recommendation (constant with warmup), went back to the default 32/16 dim/alpha, and figured out my sweet spot for the number of steps — somewhere around 800 (batch size 2!).

So now I can finally present you with some decent results... I hope. 😄

Starting with Rukia Kuchiki in her “Hakka no Togame” Bankai form.

About Anima:

I figured out a lot of things with the help of AI and plenty of testing.

The most valuable thing I learned is that Anima produces much better results with natural language prompts (which the Anima checkpoint page actually tells you). The thing is, natural language prompting isn't really my thing, so I asked AI to give me a general quality prompt for generating anime images:

A polished high-end anime illustration with refined layered shading and clean, elegant linework. The image has strong material separation, visible midtones, subtle texture, delicate folds and controlled highlights. Hair is rendered with fine individual strands and soft highlights, while the eyes are luminous, detailed and expressive. Lighting is balanced and cinematic, with soft directional light, restrained bloom, subtle rim light and clear tonal contrast. The scene contains fine atmospheric details and depth without becoming overly busy, with crisp silhouettes and a highly finished professional anime illustration look.

The difference? See for yourself (same seed and prompt btw):

Left: Danbooru quality prompt (masterpiece, best quality)
Middle: Danbooru quality tags + natural language quality prompt
Right: Danbooru quality tags + natural language quality prompt + anime coloring

"Anime coloring" somewhat makes the image look worse, so why would you use it?

Well, with just the normal quality prompts (Danbooru + natural language), the images can sometimes look almost too polished and a bit too AI-ish. That's why I personally like using anime coloring to tone that down a little. However, it's completely optional.

Prompt: look at "Trigger Words" on the right side 👉

Changelog: look at "About this Version" on the right side 👉

My Settings (forge neo)*:

*note, the example images only use high-res fix.

Checkpoint: waiNSFWIllustrious_v170 for IL, waiANIMA_v10Base10 for anima

Sampler: Euler a for both IL and Anima

Scheduler: Automatic Karras for IL, Normal for Anima

Samplings Steps: 30 for both IL and Anima

Hires.fix: R-ERSGAN 4x+Anime6B, 20 Hires steps for both IL and Anima, Denoising Strength: 0.3-0.5 for IL and 0.2-0.4 for anima

Extensions (nice to have for little more Details):

Adetailer (highly recommended)