Flow Login

If you work at a VFX or animation studio, your entire pipeline probably lives in Autodesk Flow - the thing your supervisor still calls ShotGrid. Projects, shots, tasks, versions, notes, reviews all hang off that one site. This node is how ComfyUI gets a seat at that table.

Flow Login is the first node in the comfyui_vfx-flow pack and the only one that touches credentials. Nothing else in the pack does anything until this node succeeds, because everything downstream rides on the connection it opens. It doesn't touch pixels - it's pure plumbing, and in the best tradition of plumbing it's the piece you set up once and then forget.

Be honest with yourself about whether you need it, though. This is not a hobbyist node. If you generate images for fun, a ShotGrid instance costs real money, needs an admin, and solves problems you don't have. This pack is for artists and pipeline TDs inside a studio, or for render-farm automation against a company site. Community takes on this are blunt: people who've tried to bolt traditional shot-tracking onto AI workflows describe ShotGrid as expensive and built for a heavier production model than most AI loops. If a studio is asking you to publish versions to Flow, this is the bridge. If not, close the tab.

How it works

Flow Login authenticates against your site with one of two methods:

• user - your email and password. This is the recommended method for an artist sitting at a workstation, because permissions and task assignments then belong to you.
• script - an API key from Admin → Scripts in Flow, created as a named script like comfyui_vfx_flow. This is for render farms and headless batches where nobody's typing a password.

Pick auth_method, fill in the matching fields, and the node opens a ShotGrid connection and caches it, so re-running the workflow doesn't re-login. The status output tells you what happened - ✓ Connected plus your site and identity, or an ERROR: string you can read on a text display node.

The frontend side is decent, which is nice for a pack this small: the web extension adds a Login button to the node, masks the password field so it doesn't glow in your screen recording, and shows the connection status in the node body.

The inputs and outputs that matter

You set two things, really:

• site_url - e.g. https://your-studio.shotgrid.autodesk.com. This is the one you'll mistype.
• auth_method - user or script. Everything else on the node is whichever credential pair matches.

The outputs are the whole point of the node:

• session (type FLOW_SESSION) - the live connection. Wire it into Project Browser's session input.
• status (STRING) - the human-readable result.

Credentials don't have to live in the graph. The pack reads FLOW_SITE_URL, FLOW_SCRIPT_NAME, FLOW_API_KEY, FLOW_LOGIN and FLOW_PASSWORD from environment variables, and will also load a .env file sitting in the custom node folder or your home directory. Handy for keeping keys out of shared workflow JSON.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: open Manager, search for VFX Flow, install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/beverlyhillscop90210/comfyui_vfx-flow
cd comfyui_vfx-flow
pip install -r requirements.txt

The only dependency is shotgun_api3>=3.3.0, and the README asks for ComfyUI 0.8+ and Python 3.10+. No model files to download - this pack ships zero weights, which is refreshing.

Where people get burned

• shotgun_api3 missing. The pack prints [VFX Flow] shotgun_api3 not installed to your ComfyUI console at startup and every Flow Login run hands back an error until you pip install shotgun_api3. Check the console first - it tells you exactly this.
• User vs script confusion. With auth_method set to script and an empty api_key, you get a clear "No API key provided" message; with user and a blank login/password, same shape. Pick one method and fill only that pair.
• Expecting it to work without a site. There is no mock mode, no offline fallback. No Flow site, no node.

Flow Login is the honest, functional heart of the pack - a small, single-purpose bridge that does one thing and does it clearly.