BYOKey Runway Text to Image

You probably think of Runway as a video company, but Gen4 does still images too, and they're good - cinematic in a way that matches the video side. This node is the bring-your-own-key way to get them into a ComfyUI graph. The nice part: pair it with BYOKey_Runway_Image2Video in the same pack and you've got a fully Runway pipeline - image out of this node, straight into the video node as its start frame.

How it works. One POST to api.dev.runwayml.com/v1 (the default base_url, overridable for a relay) with your key as a Bearer token. Runway's image endpoint is async, so the node polls until the image is done (default every 5 seconds, up to 5 minutes), then decodes the PNG into a [1, H, W, C] torch tensor for standard image preview/save nodes. An optional reference_image gets sent along to guide generation - Runway's Gen4 is genuinely good at carrying a reference's look into a new image.

The inputs that matter:

• prompt - your text description. Cinematic phrasing plays to Gen4's strengths; think in terms of lens, light, and frame.
• ratio - 10 presets from 1920:1080 down to portrait 1080:1920, including the slightly unusual 2112:912 and 1808:768 ultrawides. Pick your format before you queue.
• reference_image - optional IMAGE input. Feed it a character, a style, or an existing render to steer the result. This is the input that makes the node more interesting than a plain t2i call.
• poll_interval / max_wait - the usual babysitters. Image jobs are fast, so the 300s default cap rarely gets hit.

One thing you won't find here: no seed input. Runway's image API doesn't expose one through this node, so don't go hunting for reproducibility - you get what you get and re-roll if you don't like it.

Output: one output (IMAGE) socket. Straight into Save Image, or into the Runway i2v node next door.

Install. Shared pack, one clone:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MeteorAndy/comfyui-byokey.git
# restart ComfyUI; it's under api/byokey/image

No model downloads, no extra dependencies beyond ComfyUI's bundled torch, aiohttp, PIL, numpy and av.

Gotchas. No seed means every run is a fresh roll - fine for exploration, annoying if you wanted a specific look back. And the pack is young with zero community footprint, so the standing advice applies: skim the source before pasting a real key in.