Identity Forge Archetype

Sometimes you don't want a random person, you want a random person who happens to be a knight. Or a sorceress, a pirate, a samurai, a pop star, an astronaut, a 1950s homemaker - take your pick from about 240 archetypes. Identity Forge Archetype is the pack's theme layer: it stamps a curated look onto a character while the person underneath keeps randomizing. Same idea as the Cosplayer node, just for looks instead of licensed characters.

How it works

An archetype is a preset document defining the look - costume, hair, makeup, setting. The node emits it as character_json, which you wire into Identity Forge's archetype_json socket (or chain through upstream like the other preset nodes). The key control is lock_level, and it decides how much of the theme sticks:

• Essentials (default) - only the look ships: costume, hair, makeup, setting. The person (body, face, ethnicity) still randomizes freely downstream, so every run is a different knight.
• Full preset - locks every field the archetype defines for a faithful, reproducible version of that archetype.

Costume colours vary by seed either way, so even the same archetype on the same person won't read identical every run - good if you're batching variations, mildly annoying if you wanted an exact costume; fix the seed to pin it.

The inputs

There are only three, plus the chain input:

• archetype - None emits nothing (and passes upstream through); Random picks one with the seed; or type to filter the list and pick a specific look.
• lock_level - Essentials vs Full preset, above.
• seed - drives the archetype pick and the costume colour variation. The control below defaults to randomize.
• upstream - optional; chain another preset's character_json here to stack. This node wins where fields overlap, the node closest to Identity Forge wins overall.

The constraint engine still has your back

The theme layer plugs into the same coherence engine as the main node, and it matters in a specific way: the gender gate is hard even for values arriving locked from a preset. Point a masculine archetype at a Forge node set to Female and you won't get a bearded knight - the engine drops the incompatible value, re-rolls it within the female pool, and logs a notice. Costume archetypes also carry their own outfit, so the Forge node's wardrobe and outfit randomization don't apply to them - colours still vary, but the garments are the archetype's.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack - zero dependencies, fully offline, no model downloads:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/EnragedAntelope/comfyui-identity-forge

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager (search "Identity Forge"). Note this node does nothing on its own: it's a seed layer, and without the main Identity Forge node downstream it has nowhere to send its JSON. It also needs a recent ComfyUI (0.25.0+) since the pack is built on the V3 API.

Gotchas

The pack-wide one applies: after an update, a node on a saved graph can throw a NoneType error or show a blank widget, because its fields were built when the node was created. Delete and re-add the node to clear it. And the useful tip from the docs: if you want a character-only description to splice into a scene you write yourself, set the Forge node's scene fields (location, lighting, shot_type, mood) to None - the archetype keeps its look, the scene stays yours.

It's a thin node in the best sense - one job, done well. If themed character generation is your thing, this plus Cosplayer covers about 2,000 distinct looks between them, and you never write a costume paragraph again.