Anima Artist Structure Guard

Mixing artist styles on Anima is a deal with the devil. You bolt wlop's rendering onto sakimichan's linework, but the more style you push in, the more the composition bends - faces drift, anatomy melts, the subject stops looking like your base prompt. That's not a bug in your prompt. It's the cost of mixing inside Anima's non-linear LLM-encoder space, and the pack author says it plainly: Anima artist mixing is never as lossless as an SDXL artist chain.

Anima Artist Structure Guard is the knob that pulls structure back. It's deliberately tiny - two sliders in, one options object out - and that's the whole point. It slots into your artist-mixing chain and nudges the artist deltas toward the base composition instead of letting them run wild.

How it works

It's not a mixer, and it does no encoding or model math of its own. It's a pass-through that reads an existing advanced_options object, stamps two values into it, and hands it forward for the Cross-Attn mixer (or the Adapter Mixer) to consume when it applies the artist delta:

• structure_preserve (0–1) - pushes interpolate deltas toward the safer base_preserve direction. In base_preserve mode the mixer removes the part of the artist delta that points along the base output, which preserves subject and composition at the cost of a little style. This slider is a gradual version of that: 0.0 is old behavior, 1.0 is the strongest directional lock.
• delta_norm_cap (0–4) - a hard ceiling on how large the artist delta can get relative to the base attention output. 0.0 disables the cap. Think of it as a volume limit on artist influence: raise it when one strong artist is overwhelming everything, lower it when anatomy starts collapsing.

Both default to 0.0, so dropping the node into an existing workflow changes nothing until you turn the knobs.

The inputs that matter

Honestly, just the two sliders. structure_preserve maxes at 1.0 and delta_norm_cap at 4.0, both stepped at 0.05. The optional advanced_options input is how you chain it: Anima Artist Options (Advanced) → Structure Guard → Anima Artist Cross-Attn (or the Adapter Mixer). The single output is another advanced_options you wire forward. If you don't already have an advanced node in the chain, you need to add one - the guard is a modifier, not a source.

The README's suggested starting points:

interpolate:
structure_preserve = 0.25 - 0.50
delta_norm_cap     = 1.25 - 1.75

base_preserve:
structure_preserve = 0.0
delta_norm_cap     = 1.0 - 1.5

Start with interpolate fusion and structure_preserve=0.3; only move toward base_preserve if the subject itself is drifting.

Install

It ships in the same pack as the mixer it tunes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/An1X3R/Anima-Artist-Mixer

or via ComfyUI Manager, then restart. No extra Python dependencies, no model downloads - if the node "isn't doing anything," check the chain, not the install.

Troubleshooting

Two gotchas worth knowing. First, after a pack update, a workflow that suddenly produces bad structure is usually a stale widget mapping on the advanced node - recreate Anima Artist Options (Advanced) once so ComfyUI refreshes it. Second, keep expectations realistic: the guard makes structure degradation controllable, it doesn't erase the tradeoff. If a mix needs heavy guarding to look right, the honest fix is fewer artists or a style LoRA, not cranking delta_norm_cap to 4 and hoping.