Anima Artist Style Balance

Here's the Anima mixing problem nobody warns you about: same prompt, same weights, different seed - and sometimes wlop dominates, sometimes krenz does. It's structural, not a bug. The cross-attention Q comes from seed-driven hidden state, so each seed "reads" your artist tokens slightly differently, and the dominant artist can flip between generations. AnimaArtistStyleBalance is the one-knob answer to that specific complaint.

What it does

style_balance is a single slider, 0 to 1, default 0 (off). It reduces seed-to-seed artist dominance drift by evening out each artist's delta strength before your user weights are applied - so a seed that would have spiked one artist's influence gets that spike leveled before it reaches the mix. Under the hood it maps onto the expert option contribution_balance (and its _alpha), which is described in the expert panel as a "delta-strength equalizer for artist dominance flips." This node is just the friendly front door to that toggle.

The optional advanced_options input lets you chain it: feed in existing ANIMA_OPTS from elsewhere and this node layers the balance setting on top.

Output

One output: advanced_options (ANIMA_OPTS), wired into AnimaArtistPresetApply.advanced_options or AnimaArtistCrossAttn.advanced_options - exactly like AnimaArtistSimpleOptions, it's a builder for the options object.

Install

Manager → search "Anima Artist Mixer Forge", or:

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

then restart. No extra dependencies. Standard Anima files (UNET, qwen_3_06b_base, qwen_image_vae) and the Anima-compatible CLIP loader apply, and remove the original Anima-Artist-Mixer if it's installed - duplicate node names shadow each other.

My take

Honest note: the README says contribution_balance defaults to off "until it has stronger live evidence," so this slider is the pack's experimental stabilizer, not its settled one. Start at 0.5 and compare a few seeds at 0 vs on. For the same goal there are heavier hammers - artist_ema_alpha smooths across steps, and anchor_lock goes all the way to a fixed-seed anchor - but StyleBalance is the cheapest thing to try first, and it's the only one with literally one knob. If it's not enough, you know where the expert panel is.