■I trained a LoRA using 20,000 carefully handpicked aesthetic anime images. Since others have made similar LoRAs, it’s nothing overly special, but because there isn't much training information available for Anima yet, I thought I'd share my experience. Detailed information about the LoRA itself is available on its Civitai page.
https://civitai.red/models/2554528?modelVersionId=2915270
■It's not much different from the official one, but I've also included my own inference workflow on the page, so you might find it helpful to use as a reference.
■In terms of its effect, it’s designed more to raise the baseline quality (the floor) rather than pushing the absolute maximum potential (the ceiling). It suppresses overly vivid or flat results, guiding the image toward a more cohesive, aesthetic vibe with adjusted spatial lighting and tones. If you're already getting great results from the base model, you won't see a dramatic change—the LoRA will simply take on a supporting role. I believe this LoRA aligns closely with the style tendencies of standard "quality tags," so if you use those, the differences will be minimal. On the other hand, if you haven't specified a style or are using short prompts, the LoRA will make a much larger style adjustment to ensure the output feels aesthetically pleasing.
This explanation isn't limited to just this LoRA the same can probably be said for most LoRAs.
■Also, on the same page, there's another LoRA called "sdxl_glossy_lora" which replicates that highly glossy AI style typical of SDXL. If you like that particular look, it might be fun to play around with. It was trained on 1,250 glossy SDXL images, so it consistently generates that familiar vibe.
■I used the tool linked below for the LoRA training.
https://github.com/gazingstars123/Anima-Standalone-Trainer
I was really grateful to be able to train LoRAs natively on Windows. You should be able to run satisfactory settings if you have around 16GB of VRAM. Depending on your configuration, it might even be possible to train with 12GB. It's an incredibly user-friendly tool. If you like it, please consider donating to the developer—it will serve as a great stepping stone for making the tool even better. Also, don't forget to leave a star for them! It really boosts their motivation.
My training settings for Anima:
Resolution: 1024px
Learning Rate (lr): 1e-4
Optimizer: AdamW
Rank (Dim): 64
Batch Size: 4
Gradient Accumulation: 16
(Effective Batch Size: 64)
In hindsight, a learning rate of 2e-4 might have been better, as the training felt a bit slow. Ultimately, I trained for about 15,500 steps (roughly 48 epochs), but I probably could have reached the sweet spot in less time.
For the "sdxl_glossy_lora", the settings were:
Resolution: 1024px
Learning Rate (lr): 1e-4
Optimizer: AdamW
Rank (Dim): 32
Batch Size: 4
Gradient Accumulation: 8
(Effective Batch Size: 32)
This one trained faster and might be a bit easier to work with.
I use the standard AdamW optimizer because, in my experience with LoRAs, the VRAM consumption doesn't seem drastically different compared to using 8-bit optimizers.
By the way, I’ve also linked an aesthetic Anime LoRA for Chroma in the related section, so please check it out if you're interested.
Chroma is a rare, uncensored model that is capable of generating both anime and photorealistic styles. Just like Anima, Chroma is a fantastic model created by the community.(Also, I personally feel that Chroma produces much more natural-looking images.)
I truly hope that the ecosystem continues to be built around these kinds of transparent, community-driven models.