Ckpt Load With Clip Skip

If you work with anime-style SD 1.5 checkpoints, you already know the ritual: load the checkpoint, add a Clip Set Last Layer node, set it to -2, and hope you remember which values the model family expects. AUNCheckpointLoaderWithClipSkip ("Ckpt Load With Clip Skip") collapses that into one loader with a clip_skip widget on the face of it. Pick the checkpoint, set clip_skip, and out come MODEL, CLIP, and VAE - with the CLIP already adjusted.

The two inputs are ckpt_name (your standard checkpoint dropdown, populated from your models/checkpoints folder) and clip_skip, an integer from -24 to -1 with -1 as default. It's negative by convention - that's the number of CLIP layers skipped counting from the last one. For the Danbooru-lineage models - anything descended from NovelAI's weights through Pony, Illustrious, NoobAI - the standard is -2, and their release notes print "Clip Skip: 2" for a reason: the weights were trained expecting the penultimate layer, so skip one more layer and you get their intended look. Set it to 1 on those and you get noise soup.

But here's the honest caveat, and it's one the knowledge base makes loud: clip skip is a shrinking dial. It's load-bearing on SD 1.5 anime models and genuinely irrelevant on anything using an LLM text encoder - Flux, and most of 2026's mainstream releases run their own text encoders where "skip a CLIP layer" has nothing to attach to. On SDXL, both text encoders already default to the penultimate layer, so clip skip 2 usually changes nothing. In other words: if you're on a modern model, leave clip_skip at -1 and ignore it; if you're on an anime SD 1.5 checkpoint, set -2 and enjoy.

The extra outputs are why AUN users prefer this over a stock loader plus a clip-skip node. name is a STRING with the checkpoint's name - no separate Extract Model Name node needed when you're building filenames or sidecars. clip skip is an INT echoing what you set, so your filename machinery can record it. Both feed straight into the pack's Path Filename V2 / Save Image V2 family, which is exactly how these nodes are meant to be chained.

Mechanically, it's a thin wrapper: load the checkpoint, apply the clip skip to the CLIP output (the same operation a Clip Set Last Layer node performs), hand everything out. Nothing exotic, no models to download beyond the checkpoint itself.

Install with the pack: ComfyUI Manager (search "AUN") or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/loz2754/AUN-ComfyUI-Nodes, then restart. Dependencies are the pack's usual four (piexif, opencv-python-headless, imageio-ffmpeg, requests); if you cloned manually and ComfyUI throws ModuleNotFoundError: piexif or cv2, run pip install -r custom_nodes/AUN-ComfyUI-Nodes/requirements.txt. This node saves you one node and one workflow step every single time - small, but you feel it.