Atlas Project 🎬

AtlasProject is the boring node at the start of every Atlas Camera workflow, and that's exactly what it's for. It does no math, sees no pixels, runs no model. What it does is give the whole pack a name, a place, and a colour pipeline - so that an hour later, AtlasExportNuke or AtlasExportMayaLayers knows where to write files and what colourspace to hand them in. Think of it as the file cabinet you agree on before you start making a mess on the desk.

The pack is built around the idea that one photograph goes in and a projection setup for Nuke, Maya, USD or Blender comes out. That output is a folder tree full of cameras, meshes, plates and scripts - and someone has to decide what that tree is called and where it lives. That someone is this node. The README calls it the graph face of the core AtlasProject class, which is a polite way of saying "it's metadata with a widget face."

What you actually set

• project and shot - just names. The defaults (untitled_project / shot010) are fine for a test; you'll want real ones before you export anything you care about.
• colour_mode - the one with teeth. Standard (sRGB) keeps everything simple and never mentions colour management. VFX (ACEScg / float) opens the managed lane: plates get tracked by reference in their working colourspace and bit depth (EXR 16/32-bit float), and exports talk OpenColorIO, Nuke and Resolve properly. If you're a matte painter or environment artist handing off to a DCC, pick VFX and get used to it. If you're just poking at one photo, Standard is fine and hides all of that.
• project_root - empty uses ComfyUI's output folder, or the $ATLAS_PROJECT_ROOT environment variable if you've set one. Set an absolute path to route the whole project somewhere sane, like a real studio folder structure.
• create_tree - on by default, and it's exactly what it sounds like: mint the folder structure up front.

The one output

You get a single ATLAS_PROJECT out. That's not an image or a number - it's the project handle every other Atlas node in the graph consumes. Wire it into your exporters and they inherit the naming, root and colour lane automatically. Miss it out and you're back to guessing where files landed, which is the classic failure mode of any pipeline that writes to disk.

Install

Atlas ships as one pack, and this node is in the dependency-free core tier - pure Python, no GPU, nothing extra to pip install.

cd <ComfyUI>/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/mikejamesvfx/atlas-camera.git

Then restart ComfyUI. Or search "atlas-camera" in ComfyUI Manager and hit install. You'll find this node under the Atlas menu in the 01 · Input & Camera folder - the whole menu is laid out in pipeline order, so the first folder is literally where you start.

Gotchas

The thing that bites people is colour mode. If you start in Standard (sRGB) and flip to VFX halfway through, downstream exports change colourspace on you - decide at the top of the graph and leave it. Also remember the project is referenced, not copied: create_tree writes folders at queue time, so if you rename a project, old exports don't follow you. Cheap to fix, annoying to discover.