Anima Artist Basic (Recommended)

If you're on Anima and you've tried stacking two or three artist tags in one prompt, you know the problem already: the model's LLM text encoder makes every token borrow meaning from its neighbors, so the artists muddle each other into a compromise that looks like neither. This is the node the pack's authors reach for first, and it's the one I'd start with too. It wraps the whole split-and-mix pipeline into a single box, and its only job is to make "pick a few artists, get their styles blended instead of averaged into mush" a five-minute setup.

AnimaArtistBasic is the recommended one-node route: it internally chains the pack's AnimaArtistPack (split + encode each artist separately) through a preset into the cross-attention patch, so you never touch the intermediate pieces until you outgrow them.

What goes in

• model - your Anima UNET, straight from the model loader.
• clip - the Anima-compatible CLIP loader. This is the trap: it has to be the same loader Anima's own text-encoding workflows use (the one whose tokens carry t5xxl_ids), not a random CLIP loader. Wire the wrong one and encoding silently misbehaves.
• artist_chain - your artists, comma or newline separated. This is the only field that really matters. Leave weights out for your first run; the syntax (1.2::artist::, @layers, %timing) works here too once you know you want it.
• base_prompt - your actual prompt. Do not repeat the artist names in here; they're already handled by the chain.
• preset - balanced (default, closest to the original mixer), strong_style, drift_auto, or prompt_passthrough (the no-mixer direct-prompt path).
• intensity - a strength multiplier from 0–2, default 1.0.
• enabled - the master switch, handy for A/B'ing the mixer against a plain prompt.

What comes out

Two outputs, and the wiring is exactly two lines: model goes to KSampler's model, and base_prompt (a CONDITIONING) goes to KSampler's positive. Your negative still comes from a normal CLIPTextEncode. That's the entire workflow.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → search "Anima Artist Mixer Forge" → install → restart. Or clone it:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/peter119lee/Anima-Artist-Mixer-Forge

Then restart ComfyUI. No extra Python dependencies - pyproject.toml lists an empty deps array. What you do need on disk are the three Anima files: the UNET in models/diffusion_models, the qwen_3_06b_base text encoder in models/text_encoders, and qwen_image_vae in models/vae. If you have the original Anima-Artist-Mixer installed, remove it first - both packs define the same node names and will shadow each other.

Notes from the trenches

Start with balanced at intensity 1.0 and one seed, then move to strong_style when the blend feels too timid. A caveat worth internalizing: Anima can't do the near-lossless style mixing SDXL could. Style-similar artists mix great; style-divergent ones can regress to a middle ground, and the pack makes that distortion controllable, not invisible. Also expect the obvious slowdown - the mixer computes one extra attention pass per active artist, so multi-artist runs are slower than plain Anima. That's the cost of the feature, not a bug.