AP3-to-Illustrious Pixel Relay Upscale Workflow

A toy two-stage ComfyUI workflow made for myself that uses Anima Preview 3 to create the base image, then uses Illustrious SDXL to upscale and refine it.

The main idea is to keep AP3 focused on what it does well: caption following, scene setup, and multi-character interaction. At the same time, it avoids relying on AP3 for high-resolution diffusion refinement, since its official recommendation is to stay around the ~1MP range and image quality can degrade at higher resolutions.

In this workflow, AP3 generates the initial base image. The image is then passed in pixel space to the second stage, where the upscale model handles the actual image enlargement, and Illustrious SDXL redraws/refines the enlarged image through UltimateSDUpscale. This avoids pushing AP3 beyond its comfortable resolution range while still taking advantage of Illustrious’s stronger high-resolution redraw, background rendering, and detail refinement.

Cover generated by GPT image.