Icy VAELoader

Icy VAELoader is the ComfyUI VAELoader re-registered by the IcyHider pack - it's not a bespoke node. The pack, which hides image previews until you hover or select a node, wraps the entire core node library at startup, so you get every stock node with an "Icy" prefix and a new category. That means this loader has the same dropdown, the same output, and the same one job: hand your workflow a VAE object.

Why do you need a VAE loader at all? Because the VAE is what converts between pixels and the latent space the model actually denoises in - and a surprising number of workflows end up needing a specific one. The KB's concepts essay is blunt about the classic symptom: grey, washed-out, desaturated output almost always means a missing or wrong VAE. Some checkpoints bake their VAE in; others expect you to load one separately. And on modern models the VAE became a quality lever again - people swap VAEs to fix over-smoothing, not just color. Either way, this is the node that picks the file.

Inputs: just one - vae_name, the dropdown. It lists everything ComfyUI finds in models/vae, plus the tiny TAESD/TAE approximations it bundles for fast previews, plus one special entry: pixel_space. That last one is a real thing in current ComfyUI core, not a pack quirk - it's a virtual "VAE" that tells ComfyUI the model works directly in pixel space with no latent VAE at all (the newer pixel-space architectures that skip VAE encoding entirely). If your model isn't one of those, ignore it.

Output: VAE - wire it into VAEEncode, VAEDecode, the tiled variants, or VAEEncodeForInpaint (the IcyVAE* nodes in this same pack, which are the stock ones under a snowflake).

Install, same as any IcyHider node, and it's the easiest part: the pack has zero Python dependencies and needs no model files. Via ComfyUI Manager search "IcyHider", or:

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

Restart ComfyUI, then hard-refresh the page - it's a JS extension, and a cached tab will look like the install never happened.

Troubleshooting, all grounded in how this node family actually fails: if your chosen VAE file doesn't show in the dropdown, it's not in models/vae - that's the folder the loader scans, so that's where the file goes. If output comes out as noise or flat color instead of a subtly wrong image, you've crossed VAE architectures (an SD 1.5 VAE on an SDXL workflow and vice versa); the KB's VAE section spells out that channel counts differ per architecture and it doesn't degrade gracefully. Grey images are the "you never attached a VAE" tell. And the pack gotcha you'll hit first: Avalanche mode defaults to ON, hiding every node until you click it - Settings → IcyHider turns it off. If you don't want the hiding pack at all, core VAELoader is byte-for-byte the same node, so swap freely.