H3 Continuum Reference Images

MiniMax H3 is a 33B omni-modal video model - 4 to 15 second clips at 24fps with synced stereo audio - and H3 Continuum is the pack that makes it usable for anything longer than one clip: it plans a multi-chunk timeline, carries continuity across the chunk boundaries, and lets you review, re-roll and resume without throwing away the whole run. Reference images are how you tell it who and what should stay consistent throughout. Images 1–3 wire straight into the Sampler. Images 4–9 have nowhere to go. That's the gap this node fills.

What it actually does

It packs. Up to six IMAGE inputs go in, one bundle comes out, and that bundle plugs into the Sampler's Reference Images (Optional) socket. The output type is the pack's own H3_CONTINUUM_IMAGE_REFERENCES, so it isn't going to fit anything else - it exists solely to feed that one input.

Why bother with a bundle instead of six loose wires? Readability, mostly. Six cables converging from six loaders across a graph is exactly the kind of spaghetti that makes a 30-node Continuum workflow unmaintainable when you come back to it next week. Same reasoning as a ControlNet apply stack: one authoritative list, one place to look.

The mechanism is just packaging: the node collects slots 4 through 9 and returns the bundle. No resizing, no hashing, no VAE encoding - all of that still happens inside the Sampler, which is worth knowing because it means this node costs you nothing in speed. If you connect nothing at all it returns None, and the Sampler reads that as "no extra references," which is why leaving an empty one in your graph is harmless.

Empty slots are also skipped rather than treated as gaps: the Sampler ignores bypassed or unconnected sockets and renumbers whatever is actually there as Picture 1..N in connection order. Wire images 4 and 7 and you get two references in the prompt, not a mysterious empty slot 5. Unlike the pack's Reference Audios helper - where the docs explicitly warn you not to leave a hole in the sequence - image slots are forgiving.

The inputs and output

• reference_image_4 … reference_image_9: six optional IMAGE sockets, displayed as Reference Image 4 (Optional) through Reference Image 9 (Optional). The author's tooltip: "One optional appearance or identity image. Empty slots are skipped in prompt order."
• image_references: the single output, type H3_CONTINUUM_IMAGE_REFERENCES, wired to the Sampler's Reference Images (Optional) input.

That's the whole node. There's nothing to tune on it.

Installing it

It ships inside H3 Continuum, so installing the pack is installing this node. Either search H3 Continuum in ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ukr8b3g-cmyk/ComfyUI-H3-Continuum.git

Restart ComfyUI afterwards. Updates: use Manager's Update, or git pull --ff-only origin main inside the checkout - not both, or you'll end up with two diverging copies. The pack's requirements.txt is one comment long ("no extra pip dependencies, uses the PyTorch and safetensors bundled with ComfyUI"), and pyproject.toml declares zero dependencies and requires-comfyui >= 0.32.0. The models themselves - H3 weights, both VAEs, the text encoder - are separate downloads, as are the optional LightX2V Turbo LoRAs. The official V3.8X2 workflow also expects Spectrum, rgthree and KJNodes to be installed before it will open cleanly.

Where people get burned

Nine references is not a free upgrade. The README is unusually blunt about this: all nine is a high-resource configuration, not the normal requirement. The nine-reference acceptance run only fit on a 16GB card after the source images were trimmed to roughly 0.30 MP each - Sampling then used about 15.0–15.5 GiB of 16,311 MiB. So resize copies of your reference images before loading them, and don't assume nine beats three.

The resize setting isn't here. Reference Image Size - Match Output versus the hungrier Max Identity - lives on the Sampler, under Advanced. People hunt for it on this node because this is the node that says "reference images." It isn't.

Legacy migration is automatic but not magic. Workflows saved with the old direct image 4/5 inputs get those links moved into a bundle when the graph loads; if the source link is gone or the destination occupied, the old link stays and you get a warning. Connecting a slot through both the legacy input and the bundle at once is a hard error, not a warning.

Wiring it wrong. There's one valid destination. If the image_references cable is going anywhere other than Reference Images (Optional) on H3 Continuum Sampler V3.8, nothing downstream will accept the type.