Anima-2.9B is a fine-tune and layer-expansion of [circlestone-labs/Anima](https://huggingface.co/circlestone-labs/Anima). The base Anima model targets anime, illustration, and non-photorealistic art; Anima-2.9B continues training on that foundation with an expanded architecture. The model is trained on an additional 1.7M anime/illustration samples, with knowledge cutoff in July 2026, making Anima-2.9B one of the most capable and up-to-date anime/illustration models at release.

[https://huggingface.co/Gazingstars123/Anima-2.9B](https://huggingface.co/Gazingstars123/Anima-2.9B)

# Training/Dataset

* Trained using Muon optimizer on a 8x 5080s cluster, with earlier steps trained locally on my PC
* As of preview v1, only new layers have been trained, with roughly 70% of the compute spent on 1024px
* Knowledge cutoff in July 2026, training data included both new and old samples prior to September 2025
* Mixed captioning, including both tags and natural languages, using a mix of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Claude Sonnet 5

Lora Training will be supported via my [Anima Standalone Trainer](https://github.com/gazingstars123/Anima-Standalone-Trainer) in a few days.

You will need to install [ComfyUI-Anima-2.9B](https://github.com/gazingstars123/ComfyUI-Anima-2.9B) to the custom node folder. Plug and play, there is no workflow node needed (few custom nodes may not work properly).

The model is still in active development (more general pretraining, more anime/illustration/ACG focus beyond Booru), you can support me and the training progress via my links on huggingface. I will try and bring native support for the model to generations platform as well as ComfyUI

[Release] Anima-2.9B-Preview-v1 - Expanded Anima