Pixal3D Texture VAE (CRT AutoDL)

Every 3D generator has the same dirty secret: the hard part isn't sculpting the shape, it's making the thing look like anything. Pixal3D splits that job across two stages and two VAEs, and this is the second one - the texture VAE, the half that takes the bare geometry from the shape stage and gives it surface color and material. In TRELLIS.2 terms (Pixal3D is built on that family), it's the paint pass, and with Pixal3D that paint includes PBR-style material properties, not just a flat diffuse map.

CRTAutoDLPixal3DTextureVAE downloads trellis_2_texture_vae_bf16.safetensors into ComfyUI/models/vae/ on the first run and loads it. No inputs, one VAE output, nothing to configure. Same AutoDL pattern as every other node in this pack's Pixal3D family: check disk, download if needed, load, hand you the socket.

The one output

VAE - wires into the texture side of the native Trellis2 pipeline, specifically VaeDecodeTextureTrellis, which decodes the texture latent and produces the colored, material-bearing mesh you actually export. The node literally could not be simpler: it exists so you don't have to know that the right file is trellis_2_texture_vae_bf16.safetensors, or where it goes, or what dtype it loads at.

Install

Standard pack install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/PGCRT/CRT-Nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI, or install via Manager by searching CRT-Nodes. Then require a reasonably new ComfyUI - this node delegates to core Trellis2/Pixal3D nodes, so if VaeDecodeTextureTrellis is missing from your node list, update ComfyUI before debugging anything else.

Gotchas

• First run downloads. Console progress bar, one time, lands in models/vae/. If you already have the file there, the node just uses it - and ComfyUI's plain VAE loader can reuse it afterward.
• This is a texture VAE, not an image VAE. Don't try to feed it into a normal VAEDecode for a picture; it operates on Pixal3D's texture latent, and the socket types won't line up anyway.
• Updates. After a CRT-Nodes update, changed sockets can make nodes render red or show NaN - right-click → Fix node (recreate) per the README.

There's a real question about whether nodes this thin deserve separate pages, and the honest answer is: on their own they're trivial, but in the Pixal3D graph they're load-bearing. Between the model selector, the DINOv3 CLIP vision, two VAEs, MoGe for camera FOV, and BiRefNet for clean input, you'd otherwise be downloading and placing six different model files by hand. The texture VAE is the one that makes the difference between a gray blob and a finished asset - and with this node, you get there without touching a HuggingFace download page.