Indie anime model MageTrail V0.4 shows artist-style learning from ~$20; 6k-artist run priced at $1-2k
Turbulent-Bass-649 · reddit · 2026-10-13
An indie dev shipped MageTrail V0.4, a 2.8B DiT adapted from Microsoft's MageFlow 4B for the danbooru/e621 tagging systems, now sponsored with $500 in GPU credits by KohakuBlueLeaf, Comfy Org core dev and LyCORIS creator.
The small 6k-image, 100-artist finetune validated three things: the model learns artist styles (and hints of character fidelity) with visible results from $20 of training; swapping MageVAE for Flux2VAE needed zero realignment and improved detail; and extrapolating the learning curve, a 6,000-artist run would cost $1k-2k plus $300 of captioning. Facing a $300 funding gap, the author delays the 300k-image V0.5 by at least a month. Weights are live on Civitai and HuggingFace; V0.4 is test-only.
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