Load Checkpoint With Config (Any)

Every config option this node offers is from the SD 1.x/2.x era: anything_v3.yaml, five flavors of v1-inference*.yaml, four flavors of v2-inference*.yaml, plus an inpainting variant of each. If that list doesn't ring a bell, that's a good sign - it means you've never needed this node, and you probably still don't.

What it's actually for

Back before ComfyUI checkpoints could self-describe their architecture, you had to pair a checkpoint file with an explicit YAML config so ComfyUI knew how to build the model - how many attention heads, what resolution the model expects, whether it's an inpainting variant, and so on. CheckpointLoader_Any is that original, manual-config loader, wrapped with the pack's usual optional any input. It takes two required fields: config_name (one of those eleven legacy configs) and ckpt_name (the file itself, from models/checkpoints). Outputs are the familiar trio - MODEL, CLIP, VAE.

Compare that to CheckpointLoaderSimple_Any, this pack's other checkpoint node, which autodetects everything this one makes you specify by hand. For essentially every checkpoint released since SDXL, CheckpointLoaderSimple_Any is what you want - it reads the architecture straight from the file.

When you'd genuinely reach for this one

A handful of old SD 1.5-era checkpoints and merges - particularly some from 2022-2023 - don't carry a usable embedded config and will fail or misbehave on the simple loader. anything_v3.yaml exists specifically for the Anything v3 anime checkpoint, one of the most-forked SD 1.5 finetunes of its era. If you're loading something specifically from that vintage and the simple loader is throwing errors, this is the escape hatch.

The any input

Same trick as everywhere else in the pack: an optional input that accepts anything and does nothing with the value - it exists purely to defer execution until whatever feeds it finishes. Given how rarely this specific node gets used in a modern workflow, the staging benefit is mostly academic, but it's there for consistency with the rest of the pack.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI-LoaderUtils, install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lrzjason/ComfyUI-LoaderUtils

No extra dependencies.

Where people get burned

The honest failure mode here is using this node when you shouldn't be. Point it at a modern SDXL, Flux, or any newer checkpoint and it will fail outright - none of the eleven available configs describe those architectures, and there's no "auto" option to fall back on. If you're getting a shape-mismatch or dimension error on load, the first thing to check isn't which config you picked, it's whether you need this node at all. Nine times out of ten, the fix is switching to CheckpointLoaderSimple_Any and letting it read the architecture from the file itself.