anima / sdcpp / createVariant

The img2img side of the Anima cloud node. Drop in an image, type where you want it to go in plain language, and Anima re-renders it on Civitai's sdcpp fleet - no checkpoint download, no local GPU. This is the "restyle this sketch as a finished anime piece" node, or the one you use to run a rough render through Anima's much better prompt comprehension and get a version that actually follows the sentence.

The pairing is the reason to use this over a generic img2img: Anima is the model that understands, so a variant prompt like "redraw this as a night scene, keep her pose and outfit" lands with unusual fidelity - at strengths where an SDXL img2img would have drifted into mush. Variant work is iteration-heavy, so the cloud billing is the tradeoff to keep in mind; Anima wants its 30 steps, and each run is a billable job.

How it works

Same Orchestration client as the rest of the pack: submit engine: sdcpp, ecosystem: anima, operation: createVariant with the source image, prompt, and strength; long-poll; get a ComfyUI IMAGE back. diffuser_model is optional - leave it empty for the base Anima.

The inputs that matter

• prompt (required) - what the variant should become. Natural language works, Danbooru tags work, both work.
• image (required, IMAGE) - the source being re-rendered.
• strength - the key knob. Low (0.4–0.5) restyles while preserving composition; high (0.7–0.8) lets Anima rewrite the scene. Anima tolerates high strength better than SDXL because its comprehension keeps the result coherent.
• steps / cfg_scale - 30 / 4, the model-card defaults; Anima genuinely wants the steps.
• negative_prompt - the deviantart dataset-tag trick works here too if the source aesthetic is drifting.

Install

Pack install: ComfyUI Manager → "Civitai Comfy Nodes" → Install → restart, or clone https://github.com/civitai/civitai-comfy-nodes.git into custom_nodes, pip install -r civitai-comfy-nodes/requirements.txt (just requests), restart.

Common issues

Credentials: Civitai Auth node into api_config or CIVITAI_API_TOKEN env var (from civitai.com/user/account); headless needs the env var.

Two Anima-specific notes. One: it's slow-ish per job even on the fleet at 30 steps, so a high quantity (max 12) is a real Buzz commitment - and remember every one of those is a separate charge. Two: the default aesthetic is deliberately plain, so if the variant comes back "correct but boring," that's the base model's design, not a broken node - push the prompt toward a named style or artist tag.

One more that trips people: Anima's width/height default to 1024, and re-rendering a square-anime source that was already 1024 works great, but a very different source aspect gets reframed into that box. Match it if you want the composition preserved.