CatPony Ani-il v8.x hits 22K downloads with refined CFG tuning for Illustrious

CatPony Ani-il v8.x, an Illustrious-based checkpoint, reached 22,257 downloads on Civitai this week. The model ships with a built-in VAE and targets both anime and photorealistic workflows, including explicit NSFW content — tags include latex, bondage, and realistic rendering.

The v8.x release refines the distilled CFG workflow introduced in v7.1, lowering the standard CFG scale to 2.5 (down from 5.0 in prior versions) while holding the distilled CFG at 3.5. Recommended settings call for Euler a sampling, 36 steps at 832×1216 or 680×1208 resolution, then a 1.5× or 2× hires fix pass at 16 steps with 0.35 denoising strength. The v7.1 branch remains available for users who prefer the higher base CFG.

The creator pairs the checkpoint with the BlackStone HHP-SET v5 prompt library for randomized erotic and extreme-art workflows. Earlier versions bundled LoRA stacks for realism sliders, film grain, and dynamic posing. The model card lists no licensing restrictions beyond Civitai's standard terms. Public benchmark data comparing the distilled CFG tuning to standard Illustrious fine-tunes at equivalent step counts remains absent, and future releases should clarify whether the VAE is a custom bake or a repackaged community VAE.