◆ Base Model

Most ComfyUI graphs start with a checkpoint loader, an empty latent, and a handful of primitive nodes for seed/steps/cfg feeding into whatever samplers you've got downstream. IllustriousMasterModel - the display name is literally "◆ Base Model" - collapses all of that into a single block you drop at the top of your graph once.

This is the pack's own signature move. Its author (who posts on Reddit as u/playlogic and built a sister pack, EasyNoobai, before this one) frames the whole suite around "polished defaults, cleaner workflows" - this node is the clearest expression of that: fewer nodes to wire, and the values it does expose are picked with Illustrious specifically in mind rather than left at vanilla SDXL defaults.

What it actually does

Pick your checkpoint from the Model dropdown (it reads whatever's in your local checkpoints folder - nothing to type), set Stop at Clip Layer, pick a Resolution from a curated list of anime-oriented aspect ratios, and set your batch size, seed, steps and CFG. In return you get seven separate outputs: MODEL, VAE, CLIP for the rest of your graph to consume, LATENT already generated at your chosen resolution, and SEED/STEPS/CFG SCALE as standalone values you can route to multiple downstream nodes without retyping the same numbers into three different primitive widgets.

The Resolution list is worth a look - it's not raw width×height, it's labeled by use case: "Portrait | Character Sheet (2:3) - 832x1248," "Portrait | VN CG (3:4) - 880x1176," and so on, 23 presets total. That maps directly onto the aspect ratios the Illustrious community actually settled on: 1024×1024 native, 832×1216 for portrait work, 1216×832 for landscape.

The one default worth changing immediately

cfg defaults to 7 - the vanilla SDXL value, not Illustrious's. Illustrious and its merges want CFG in roughly the 4–7 range with a sweet spot around 5; 7 sits at the very top edge of that and is a common cause of the "oversaturated, overcooked" look people report. This is the first thing to turn down after your first test render.

Stop at Clip Layer defaults to -2, which is the correct anime-lineage convention and matches what SDXL already conditions on by default - leave it there.

What plugs in where

• MODEL / CLIP → your CLIP Text Encode nodes and sampler.
• VAE → your VAE Encode/Decode nodes.
• LATENT → straight into a sampler, or swap in a standalone IllustriousEmptyLatentImage downstream if you want per-run resolution control without touching this node.
• SEED / STEPS / CFG SCALE → wire these into any node that takes an INT/FLOAT input instead of hardcoding the same values twice.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "EasyIllustrious," install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/regiellis/ComfyUI-EasyIllustrious
pip install -r ComfyUI-EasyIllustrious/requirements.txt

You still need your own Illustrious-family checkpoint (a v0.1-based merge like WAI or Hassaku, a NoobAI build, and so on) - this node loads models, it doesn't ship one.

Common issues

Model dropdown is empty. It reads from your ComfyUI models/checkpoints folder, so an empty list means nothing's there - check the path, not the node.

Output looks nothing like the checkpoint's example images. The README is blunt about this: use an Illustrious-XL compatible model here. A plain SD1.5 or unrelated SDXL checkpoint will load fine and produce garbage, because the resolution presets and CFG defaults are all tuned for the Illustrious family specifically.

Still getting the "burned" look after dropping CFG. Also check Resolution - going well past 1536×1536 without a second upscale pass is asking a single-pass Illustrious generation to do more than it's trained for.