💪TB | Load Any VAE

Most VAE loaders are just "point at a file, get a VAE." 💪TB | Load Any VAE is that, with one meaningful addition: it can load TinyAutoEncoder (TAESD) files, the family of miniature VAEs TinyBreaker was built around. That's a bigger deal than it sounds, because ComfyUI's stock VAE loader doesn't always know what to do with those tiny checkpoint layouts, and this pack's internal VAE wrapper was written to handle them.

Why you'd use it instead of the built-in one

The VAE does the pixel↔latent job at both ends of a workflow - encode your prompt's empty canvas into latent noise, decode the finished latent back into pixels. In TinyBreaker terms there's a subtlety: the model can run with a fast VAE or a high_quality one, and the pack's own loaders (the checkpoint loader, the upscaler) give you that choice. This node is the raw, unopinionated fallback - hand it any VAE file sitting in ComfyUI/models/vae, including TAESD variants, and it returns a VAE you can plug into the standard decode step or into the pack's transcoder experiments.

Inputs and output

• vae_name - a dropdown of VAE files found in ComfyUI/models/vae. Note it's a bare enum with no tooltip, so the field is self-explanatory: pick the file.
• Output - one VAE.

Nothing else. No dtype toggle, no "use as decoder/encoder" split (that's what Load Partial VAE is for), no quality enum. This is the minimalist member of the loader family.

Install

Same pack, same steps: ComfyUI Manager → search "tinybreaker", or

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/martin-rizzo/ComfyUI-TinyBreaker

Restart, and drop whatever VAE files you want into ComfyUI/models/vae.

The honest advice

If your goal is a working TinyBreaker workflow, you probably don't need this node. The checkpoint loader handles the right VAEs automatically, and reaching for a random "better" VAE from CivitAI is more likely to fight the model than help it - the VAE the checkpoint was trained with is the one that's correct for it, which is a lesson the KB's VAE panel hammers home and that applies here harder than usual. Where this loader earns its keep: you're experimenting with the transcoder nodes and need a VAE instance that the pack's own wrapper can introspect, or you're loading a TAESD file that vanilla ComfyUI rejects with a cryptic key error. In those cases it's genuinely the right tool - just don't assume "any VAE" means "better VAE."