Load Checkpoint From CivitAI

This is ComfyUI's classic "Load Checkpoint" node with one twist: instead of picking a file that's already sitting in your models/checkpoints folder, you give it a CivitAI ID and it downloads and loads the checkpoint at run time. Same three outputs you already know - MODEL, CLIP, VAE - just a different source for the file.

Why you'd reach for this over the normal loader

The standard checkpoint loader assumes the file is already on disk before the workflow starts, which is fine on a desktop install where you download things once and they stay put. It breaks down the moment you're running ComfyUI somewhere without persistent, pre-seeded storage - a fresh cloud instance, a stateless API worker, anything spun up on demand. This node is built for that second case: hand it an ID, and the fetch becomes part of the run instead of a manual step you have to do beforehand. That's also the whole reason this pack - comfyui-model-dynamic-loader - exists at all; nearly every other node in it does the same trick for LoRAs and embeddings.

The inputs and outputs that matter

There's exactly one input, required:

• civitai_model_id (STRING) - "The ID of the model to download from CivitAI," per the node's own tooltip. Note that CivitAI's download API keys off the version ID, not the plain model-page ID you see when you're just browsing a model's overview page - if a numeric ID from the address bar doesn't resolve, look at the specific version you want and grab its ID from there (the "Copy download link" option on that version is usually the fastest way to get the right number).

Three outputs, the standard checkpoint triple:

• MODEL - into your KSampler.
• CLIP - into your CLIPTextEncode nodes.
• VAE - into whatever decodes your latent back to pixels.

Nothing else to configure. Unlike the LoRA loaders in this pack, there's no strength dial here - a checkpoint isn't a patch on top of something else, it's the base itself.

How to install it

• ComfyUI Manager - search "comfyui-model-dynamic-loader," install, restart.
• Manual -

  cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
  git clone https://github.com/jax-explorer/comfyui-model-dynamic-loader
  

  then restart. There's nothing to pre-download for the install itself - the checkpoint only gets pulled when a workflow actually calls this node with an ID.

Worth planning for regardless: checkpoints run anywhere from about 2 to 12 GB depending on the model, so the first run against a given ID is going to spend real time and bandwidth on the download before generation even starts. If your executor doesn't cache the file between runs, that cost repeats every time.

Common issues & troubleshooting

ID doesn't resolve. Same trap as the other CivitAI-sourced loaders in this pack: model-page ID versus model-version ID is the single most common mix-up. Grab the ID from a specific version, not the model's landing page.

Used to work, now it doesn't. CivitAI's catalog isn't static - takedowns and license-driven removals happen on an ongoing basis, and the platform's own numbers show a meaningful fraction of older links go dead over a year or two. If an ID that worked in an old tutorial now fails, the checkpoint may genuinely be gone rather than something being wrong with this node.

The model you want is missing even though you can see it on the site. Since April 2026, CivitAI serves SFW content from civitai.com and routes everything flagged adult to a separate domain, civitai.red, under its own terms. This node has no auth or token field, so if the checkpoint you want lives on the adult side, it may sit outside whatever the plain public download endpoint can reach.

Slow first run, then it's fine. That's the multi-gigabyte download, not a hang. Give it time on the first call with a new ID, especially on a cold executor with no warm cache.