DTGLIGENLoader

GLIGEN is the answer to a question nobody asks anymore, but it was a real moment in 2023. It's a grounded-generation model: instead of telling the sampler what to draw and hoping it lands where you want, you hand it explicit bounding boxes with labels - "a cat in this box, a lamp in that one" - and it obeys the layout. The KB's regional-prompting panel records that GLIGEN's biggest problem was never capability but interface; people built entire GUIs over it just to make it usable.

DTGLIGENLoader is the pack's online wrapper for it. You pick a GLIGEN model from the catalog, it downloads into models/gligen, and you get a GLIGEN object out.

The catalog and inputs

The dropdown (gligen_name) has two entries: GLIGEN-SD14 and GLIGEN-SD14 fp16. They're both the SD 1.4/1.5-era textbox GLIGEN from comfyanonymous's own HuggingFace repo - the fp16 one is roughly half the size and loads fine in fp16; grab it unless you have a specific reason not to. The single output is GLIGEN.

Wiring it up means using the core GLIGENTextBoxApply node: it takes your conditioning, the GLIGEN model, the bounding-box coordinates, and the text labels for each box, and returns modified conditioning you feed into the sampler. So a GLIGEN workflow looks like: checkpoint → this node → GLIGENTextBoxApply → KSampler.

How it works

Standard pack machinery: catalog fetched from api.aiart.doubtech.com/comfyui/gligen at startup, file downloaded on first use, loaded with ComfyUI's stock sd.load_gligen. These particular files come from HuggingFace direct links, which is one of the few parts of this pack's catalog that isn't sitting on Dropbox - so the download is more reliable than most entries here.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/yolanother/DTAIComfyLoaders

or search "DTAIComfyLoaders" ("Comfy UI Online Loaders") in ComfyUI Manager, then restart. Only dependency is requests.

Where people get burned

• It's SD 1.4/1.5 territory. GLIGEN-SD14 conditions an SD 1.x base. Pair it with the SD 1.5 checkpoints in the pack's catalog (Deliberate v2, DreamShaper, A-Zovya RPG), not the SDXL ones - cross-architecture conditioning silently does nothing useful.
• Boxes and labels are finicky. The whole technique lives or dies on your box coordinates and text. Expect to iterate on the boxes, not get it right first try. This is also why GLIGEN faded - bounding-box grounding lost the usability war to regional prompting and ControlNet.
• Empty dropdown on fresh start. The catalog loads in a background thread; re-add the node after a moment.

Honest verdict: this is a museum piece, but a functional one. If you're curious about layout-controlled generation or want to see what all the 2023 fuss was about, it works and the download is reliable. If you actually need precise object placement, modern union ControlNets or regional prompting are the tools with legs. This node's charm is historical, and there's nothing wrong with that.