HeyGen Create Avatar

The preset avatars in HeyGen Avatar Video are fine, but they're everyone's. This node builds your own - a reusable digital presenter that's actually yours. Give it a photo of a real person or a text description of a fictional character, and HeyGen returns a trained avatar look that you can feed straight back into Avatar Video via its custom_avatar_id.

The two modes are different enough to matter. From a photo you get a faithful clone of the person in the image - great for "the boss needs to do this video but has a calendar". From a prompt you get a generated character, optionally guided by up to three reference images for style. Both land in HeyGen's library under an avatar look ID.

How it works

The node calls HeyGen's avatar-creation API with either your photo (downscaled to 2K) or your prompt, then polls the look until it's ready. Photo avatars can take a while - HeyGen trains on the footage - while prompt-generated ones are usually quicker. Either way, the thing you walk away with is a string: the avatar_id. It's the whole product.

That's why the node nags you: it posts a progress message telling you to save the avatar_id, because nothing else in ComfyUI keeps it. If you close the workflow without copying it, you're recreating the avatar. The output has two ports - avatar_id (a STRING, which wires straight into HeyGen Avatar Video's custom_avatar_id) and preview (an IMAGE of the finished look so you can eyeball it before you spend credits presenting with it).

The inputs that matter

• source - the dynamic combo that picks the mode:
  • photo: one identity_photo of the person to clone.
  • prompt: a text description up to 1000 characters, plus optional reference_images (up to 3) to steer the generated look.

Creation is a flat per-call cost on your Comfy account (not per second like rendering), so it's cheap to make a few avatars.

Gotchas

Save the ID. Seriously - the single most common failure is a recreated avatar because the string was lost. The source combo is a fork: you can't attach both a photo and reference images at once, so decide which mode you're in before wiring things up. And be realistic about the photo path - HeyGen needs a decent, clear photo of the person; a blurry selfie gives you an avatar that doesn't quite look like anyone. The preview output exists precisely so you can check before you commit credits to a presenter video.