RetroMix XL is a three-way checkpoint merge that reconstructs the 1980s TV anime look: warm faded palettes, hand-painted cel shading, visible film grain, dramatic sunset skies and that unmistakable retro city-pop mood, while keeping the stable anatomy of the Illustrious ecosystem.

Recipe: 0.45 x NEW ERA (New Esthetic Retro Anime) + 0.30 x WAI-illustrious-SDXL v17 + 0.25 x Illustrious-XL-v1.0, applied to the UNet only (VAE and text encoder inherited from the first model).

What you get:

• 80s palette: warm creams, dusty oranges, teal shadows instead of modern saturated neon

• - Grainy film texture and slightly soft optical edges, like a scanned cel

• - Retro city-pop framing: rooftops, seaside towns, telephone poles at dusk

Great for retro posters, cassette / album cover art, nostalgic illustration, vaporwave-adjacent scenes and period-correct anime throwbacks. Add '1980s retro anime, vintage cel animation, film grain, faded colors' for the strongest effect.

[Recommended settings] Sampler DPM++ 2M or Euler a, 28-32 steps, CFG 7, 832x1216 (1216x832 for wide shots). Danbooru-style tags work best. Use bf16 where possible - fp16 can soften output.

[License] CreativeML Open RAIL-M, inherited from the base models. Please credit the base models if you redistribute. Part of the merged-checkpoint series.