⌗ CSV Generator

ComfyUI is great at showing you images and terrible at showing you numbers moving over time. CSV Generator [Dream] is the debugger for that: give it a frame counter and a value, and it writes one Frame,Value row per frame to a CSV file. When your animation parameter is drifting in a way you can't see by eyeballing frames, this is how you find out exactly what it's doing.

It's a utility node from the Dream Project Animation Nodes pack (alt-key-project), the 2023 Deforum-style animation toolkit. The pack is no longer actively maintained, but logging is logging - this still does its one job cleanly.

What it does

Four inputs: frame_counter, value (a FLOAT you wire in from any curve or calculation node - it's forceInput, so it's a socket, not a slider), csvfile (the path to write to), and csv_dialect (excel, excel-tab, or unix). It's an output node, so it has no outputs of its own.

Two behaviors worth knowing:

• On the first frame (frame 0) it recreates the file - the README is explicit that it removes existing content. So point it at a fresh path or be aware it clobbers.
• Every frame after that appends a row.

The result is a plain two-column CSV you can open in any spreadsheet, plot, or grep. It's deliberately dumb, and that's the point.

The move that makes it useful

The node lists itself as "mainly for debugging," and that's the honest frame. The genuinely nice trick: CSV Generator and CSV Curve in this pack speak the same format. Log a value during a render, then feed that file back through CSV Curve to replay it as a curve. You can even capture one curve's output and swap it in for another without touching the graph.

Second use: export data for a tool that's better at plotting than ComfyUI is. Sample a palette analysis or a brightness reading per frame, dump it, and chart the drift in Excel or Python. That's how you catch the slow color decay that Deforum-style animations are famous for - the numbers will show it long before your eyes do.

Installing

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alt-key-project/comfyui-dream-project.git

Or via ComfyUI Manager ("Dream Project Animation"). No models or heavy dependencies - the pack's runtime needs are imageio, scipy, torchvision, pilgram, and evalidate. One caveat to remember if NumPy errors appear elsewhere: the pack pins numpy<2.0. Find it under Dream → animation → curves.