Particles

Particles is the node that makes your footage feel alive - sparks flying off a welder, embers drifting up from a fire, dust motes in a shaft of light, magic sparkle over a product. It's a full 2D particle simulator that composites onto your clip, and it has a live Canvas2D preview, which is the single most important feature it has: you dial the look before committing a render, instead of iterating blind on a GPU pass.

The schema is the biggest of anything in this pack - forty-odd parameters - but it's one simulation with sensible defaults, so don't panic. Here's how to read it.

The structure of a particle system

Emission - where particles are born. emitter (point default, or area), with e_x0/e_y0/e_x1/e_y1 defining the spawn region in normalized coordinates. rate is how many per second (default 120), lifetime how long each lives (2s). Drive emission from a mask and the emitter switches to mask_edge, spawning along the mask's outline - great for outlining a subject or the "dissolving into particles" effect.

Motion - the forces that push them around: speed, direction, spread (the cone), gravity, wind, turbulence + turb_scale (the organic wobble), drag, an attract_* group (a point they're pulled toward, with a radius), and swirl. There's also a collide option (with floor_y and bounce) if you want them to land on something.

Bursts - sub_mode/sub_count/sub_speed/sub_lifetime/sub_size_ratio/sub_color spawn secondary particles from each particle's death. This is how you get the "spark flies, then shatters" double-act.

Look - size and size_end_ratio (shrink over life), opacity_start/opacity_end, optional JSON size_curve/opacity_curve for per-life shaping, color0/color1 (gradient between them), sprite (e.g. glow), renderer (sprite, stretched streaks, or trail with trail_len), stretch, blend (additive default - that's the glow look), and warmup (seconds of sim to pre-run so the field is full on frame one). And seed, naturally.

The inputs and outputs

Optional inputs: video (the clip to composite onto - leave empty to render over a blank field), mask_video and mask_image (drive mask-edge emission). One output: video (COMFYTV_VIDEO).

A sane first pass: point emitter at the bottom of frame, rate ~120, lifetime ~2, speed ~120, direction -90 (up), spread ~30, a little turbulence, additive blend with the glow sprite. That's a firework or a campfire, depending on color. Tweak gravity and swirl to taste.

Install

Pack-wide one-liner:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jtydhr88/ComfyTV

Restart ComfyUI - Desktop/macOS users: clone into the running instance by absolute path, verify __init__.py at the top level, and restart the backend, not just the browser. ComfyUI Manager finds it as "ComfyTV". No extra Python dependencies.

The trap here isn't install, it's over-parameterizing. Resist the urge to set all forty knobs - start with emission + one force + the look, preview live, and only add complexity when the shot demands it. And remember the output is a snapshot: re-run after changes, and Bridge out if you need native ComfyUI video downstream.