🔀 CR VAE Input Switch

Same switch pattern as the rest of Comfyroll's input-switch family, applied to VAEs. Wire in two VAE sources, flip a number between 1 and 2, and whichever one you picked gets forwarded. Useful for comparing a checkpoint's baked-in VAE against a separately loaded fixed VAE, or swapping between two VAE variants without rewiring the graph each time.

How it works

VAE1 and VAE2 are both optional - leave whichever you're not using disconnected. Input, restricted to 1 or 2, picks which one passes through. It's a pure passthrough: nothing about either VAE is modified or blended, and the one you didn't select just isn't used for that run.

Comfyroll ships this exact 1-or-2 switch shape for nearly every socket type - model, latent, conditioning, CLIP, image, ControlNet, text, and this one for VAE. If you've used any of the others, you already know how this behaves.

Why VAE gets its own switch

It'd be reasonable to assume VAE just rides along with whatever model you've selected, but ComfyUI treats it as an entirely separate socket, and plenty of real workflows load it separately on purpose - SDXL's well-known "VAE fix" for NaN/black-image issues on some checkpoints being the canonical example, where you load the checkpoint's own VAE but immediately override it with a standalone fixed one. That's exactly the situation this switch is built for: keep both options wired in (the checkpoint's baked-in VAE on one branch, a separately loaded fixed VAE on the other) and flip between them with one number to confirm which one is actually responsible for an artifact you're chasing, instead of re-wiring the graph each time you want to test.

Inputs and outputs that matter

• Input - integer, 1 or 2. The switch.
• VAE1, VAE2 - the two optional VAE sources.

Output: VAE (whichever was selected), plus the standard show_help link.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager - search "Comfyroll Studio", install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Suzie1/ComfyUI_Comfyroll_CustomNodes.git

then restart. No models bundled - this routes VAEs you've already loaded elsewhere (a checkpoint's baked-in VAE, or a separately loaded .safetensors VAE file).

Common issues

The usual switch trap: leave Input on 1, load a different VAE into the VAE2 branch, and wonder why the output looks unchanged - check the switch value before assuming something's broken downstream.

The one worth calling out specifically for VAE: if you're routing this alongside a matching CR Model Input Switch to compare two full checkpoints, keep the VAE and model selections in sync. Mixing a model from branch 1 with a VAE from branch 2 is occasionally intentional (some checkpoints genuinely benefit from a different, "fixed" VAE - the classic SDXL VAE-fix case), but if you're not doing that deliberately, an out-of-sync switch just gives you visually wrong results - washed-out colors or odd artifacts - that look like a model problem but are actually a VAE mismatch.

If nothing from the pack loads, that's Comfyroll's shared import failing - check your ComfyUI console for Comfyroll Studio: Failed to load ... nodes, usually a Pillow version conflict from another custom node, and reinstall Pillow or update the pack through Manager.