Model reference · open weights
Anima is an open-weight image model from Gazingstars123, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.
About
Anima-2.9B is officially supported in ComfyUI and Forge-Neo! Join my discord server!: https://discord.gg/em4PjwZvWx If you'd like to support me or to support the training progress: [](https://ko-fi.com/gazingstars) [](https://paypal.me/gazingstars123) Vast.ai: thangquay347@gmail.com Every bit of support helps expand the model's scope and capability even further! You may still need to install ComfyUI-Anima-2.9B to the custom node folder if your comfyui are not up-to-date (version 0.33.1). Plug and play, there is no custom node needed. Sometimes may not work with other custom nodes Overview Anima-2.9B is a fine-tune and layer-expansion of circlestone-labs/Anima. The base Anima model targets anime, illustration, and non-photorealistic art; this release continues training on that foundation with the 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 up-to-date anime/illustration model at release. Versions - Anima-2.9B-preview-v1: initial release Training/Dataset - Trained using Muon optimizer on a 8x 5080s cluster, with earlier steps trained locally on my PC - As of preview v1, only the new layers have been trained, with roughly 70% of the compute spent on 1024px - Knowledge cutoff is 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 - NO score tags Architecture - Transformer depth expansion: expanded from 28 transformers layers to 40, growing the model to ~2.9B parameters. Each new layer is added by deep-copying its neighboring layer's weights, using interleaved insertion with zeroed-out output projections, making the new model functionally identical to Anima-base at initialization. Prompting tips : Follow Anima prompting tips: quality tags, year/period tags, @artist tags, character count (1girl, 1boy), character tags (follow Danbooru and Gelbooru tags), series/copyrights, base appearance. Character name/tags should be follow with series/copyrights tags or else the model might con
Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.
Specifications
| Maker | Gazingstars123 |
|---|---|
| Type | Image models |
| Variants | 1 |
| Runs with | diffusion-single-file |
| Based on | circlestone-labs/Anima |
| Released | 2026-08-12 |
| Popularity | 47k downloads / month |
| Likes | 354 |
| Licence | Commercial licence needed |
How it works
Variants
Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.
| Variant | Params | Precision | VRAM | Fits 16 GB | Weights |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anima-2.9B | — | BF16 | — | — | Weights ↗ |
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys anima for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (anima below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/images/generations \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"anima","prompt":"a red bicycle","size":"1024x1024"}'
Licence
The weights are open but its licence needs a commercial agreement for business use. AxForge can arrange that licence and host the model for you — you pay AxForge, we settle with the model’s maker. Ask us for a quote. Read the licence ↗