Open Model Radar · Dossier
Anima
A 2B anime-specific base model from CircleStone Labs in collaboration with Comfy Org. It does not pursue photorealism; it targets anime characters, styles, and illustration — and precisely because it is light, it has become one of the most active base models on Civitai.
Base
Highlights
- 2B parameters, anime and illustration oriented; trained on several million anime images plus roughly 800K non-anime art images, with no synthetic data
- CFG 1 and 8–12 steps are enough to produce an image; the official recommendation is to start from the Turbo version
- The text encoder is only Qwen3-0.6B and the VAE reuses Qwen-Image VAE, so VRAM use is very low
- Native ComfyUI support, with official Base v1 and Preview templates
Scope
- Good for: anime characters, fan art, illustration styles
- Good for: low-VRAM setups and cases that stack many LoRA
- Not for: photorealistic photos (the official notes state it does this poorly)
Tips
- The anime LoRA ecosystem is very large; filter by the Anima base model when hunting for styles
- Keep CFG at 1; on distilled and fine-tuned models like this, adjusting CFG gains very little
- Text rendering is weak; add text in post
Cautions
- Non-commercial license; commercial use requires separate authorization
- 1.0, v1.0b, Aesthetic and other versions differ noticeably; check the suffix when downloading
Parameters
- Steps
- 8–12
- CFG
- 1
- Text encoder
- Qwen3-0.6B (qwen_3_06b_base)
- VAE
- Qwen-Image VAE
- Weights
- anima-base-v1.0.safetensors (several fine-tuned variants also available)
Deployment
- 16GB verdict
- No pressure at all: 2B weights plus a 0.6B encoder, so 16GB can host multiple LoRA and upscaling at the same time.
- VRAM notes
- Coexists well with other models; generation speed is among the fastest on this list.
- Suggested starting point
- Start with the official Base v1 template: CFG 1, 10 steps, 1024².
Comparison
A 2B anime-specific base model that nonetheless drew 1.47M downloads in the past 30 days — higher than any general-purpose model. The reason is that it makes anime good enough and cheap: CFG 1, 8–12 steps, only a 0.6B text encoder, and room for a stack of LoRA on 16GB. For photorealism, rule it out entirely.
Facts
- Type
- Base
- Org
- CircleStone Labs × Comfy Org
- Released
- Jan 29, 2026
- Downloads
- 1,467,209
- Daily downloads
- 5,491
- License
- CircleStone Labs Non-Commercial License