Icy StyleModelLoader

IcyStyleModelLoader loads a style model - a small file that conditions your generation toward a visual style - and hands you a STYLE_MODEL tensor. It's the least glamorous node in this pack, and that's mostly because style models themselves are the least-glamorous part of the SDXL ecosystem: powerful in the right workflow, and completely unknown to most people who've never met one.

The "Icy" prefix is the pack's privacy coat, not a different loader. IcyHider subclasses core ComfyUI nodes at startup - same inputs, outputs, and behavior, filed under the IcyHider Comfy Core category - and its JavaScript hides previews until hover. This is core StyleModelLoader with a cover on.

What it does

From the schema, one input, one output:

• style_model_name - dropdown of style model files in ComfyUI/models/style_models. The canonical ones are the SDXL "style" models from the original SDXL release (the sdxl_style_1-family weights), plus community derivatives.
• Output STYLE_MODEL - the loaded model, ready for a StyleModelApply-style node that fuses it into your conditioning.

What a style model actually is

A style model is a small adapter that biases generation toward an artistic style - a painterly look, a particular medium, a mood - by patching the conditioning path rather than the whole diffusion model. It's a different mechanism from a LoRA: LoRA patches weights and can carry a specific character or concept; a style model sits in the text-encoding side and steers style. They also differ from an unCLIP image-prompt: no reference image involved, just a style embedding you load from a file.

Honest take: style models are niche even in 2026. LoRAs and reference-image conditioning (IP-Adapter, unCLIP) cover most of what people mean by "style," and style models' influence can be subtle enough that beginners conclude they're broken. If you want a fast test, load one, apply it, and compare against the same prompt without it - the difference is usually visible in texture and mood more than composition. If you can't see a difference, it's not a bug; it's just a gentle effect.

Install

Frontend-only pack, no dependencies. The node itself downloads nothing - style model files go in ComfyUI/models/style_models manually:

# ComfyUI Manager: search "IcyHider", Install, restart

# or:
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/icekiub-ai/ComfyUI-IcyHider.git
# restart ComfyUI

Pack-wide: the hiding is DOM-based, so the newer Nodes 2.0 canvas frontend may not engage it, and the cover is screen-only. If your style_model_name dropdown is empty, that's a "you haven't put any files there yet" situation, not a pack failure.