// the find
lllyasviel/style2paints
sketch + style = paints :art: (TOG2018/SIGGRAPH2018ASIA)
An AI tool that colorizes anime line art by following the actual layered workflow illustrators use — flat color, shading, and rendering as separate outputs instead of one flattened image. It's aimed at artists and hobbyists who want assisted colorization with editable layers, not developers looking for a library or API to integrate.
Outputs are genuinely separated layers (flat color, lineart, shading, rendering) that match a real illustration pipeline, not a single flattened PNG — useful if you actually want to keep painting on top. It's backed by real published research (ACPR 2017, TOG 2018, and the CVPR 2021 SEPA work behind V5), not just a demo thrown together for stars. It also supports style-reference images and sparse hint points (the README claims usable results from under 15 clicks) rather than forcing an all-or-nothing automatic pass.
V4/V4.5, the only usable version, ships as a compiled Windows-only binary distributed through Google Drive and Baidu links — no source build, no package, nothing to run on Linux/Mac or inspect. The repo itself is a graveyard of three unrelated versions: V1 and V2 are full Cocos2d-JS game clients with hundreds of unrelated asset files, and you have to dig past all of it to find anything relevant to V4. Nothing has shipped since the 2023-08-01 push, and V5 has been stuck at "preview, not released yet" since 2021 with no sign of landing. Licensing is also murky where it matters: the code is Apache-2.0 but the pretrained model weights are explicitly "all rights reserved," which is the part anyone adopting this actually needs.