Maya Image Import

The image handoff lane for Maya

MKRMayaImageImport is how an image that lives in a Maya roundtrip - a render, a viewport grab, a texture you generated for Maya - gets from disk into ComfyUI as an actual IMAGE tensor. It's the "bring pixels in" half of the pack's Maya bridge, and it pairs with MKRMayaImageOutputPlan / MKRMayaImageOutput on the way back out.

It's part of MKRShift_Nodes, the DCC-bridge-heavy pack by Cris K B, and it shares a code base with the Nuke, Blender, Photoshop, and Fusion360 import nodes - once you've seen one, you've seen them all.

How it works

Like the rest of the bridge, it's payload-driven. The input is payload_json - the packet from your Maya add-on (or hand-written) describing an image asset, including a path. The node:

1. Parses the payload and looks for an image asset path (optionally filtered by preferred_slot, if your payload carries multiple candidate images).
2. Loads that file from disk into an IMAGE tensor (plus a MASK if the file carries an alpha channel).
3. Hands you the path and a summary.

If there's no usable path in the payload, it raises an error rather than silently producing a black frame - which I'd argue is the right failure mode, because a silent black image is how you end up debugging for an hour. The preferred_slot input is the escape hatch for payloads that list several images: tell it which one you want by name.

The outputs

Five of them:

• image (IMAGE) and mask (MASK) - the pixels, ready for any stock node. Unlike the pack's MKR_AUDIO/MKR_VIDEO types, these are standard, so the rest of your graph just works.
• payload_json - the original payload passed through (so you can keep the metadata traveling with the image).
• asset_path - the exact file that got loaded, useful for logging or filename-based logic.
• summary_json - host name, dimensions, candidate count, warnings.

Install and using it

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/criskb/MKRShift_Nodes

Restart, or install "MKRShift Nodes" via ComfyUI Manager. No pip deps, no models, no ffmpeg.

Two things to know before you rely on it. First, it's only as good as the payload: the pack ships the Maya add-on scaffold under addons/maya/ that builds these payloads for you, and hand-writing them works too, but you own the schema. Second, this is a file handoff, not a live link - if you want a live "Maya renders → appears in ComfyUI" loop, that's what the transport plan nodes and the add-on's polling machinery are for, and it's a more involved setup. For "generate a texture in Maya-land, touch it up in ComfyUI, send it back," this node plus its output-plan sibling is the whole workflow.