📦 Marigold AOV Extractor (Render Passes)

Most people use Marigold for depth. The interesting thing is that Marigold's newer "IId" decomposition models can split an image into lighting-relevant layers - albedo, shading, residual - and almost nobody knows what to do with that output, because the raw split is in a form you can't drop into a material pipeline. Marigold AOV Extractor is the node that turns those two Marigold outputs (lighting + appearance) into a proper set of render passes, naming them like the Octane AOVs they're modeled on: diffuse albedo, direct and indirect lighting, reflection/specular, ambient occlusion, and emission.

It's the most ambitious node in the TextureAlchemy pack, and it's honest about its ambition in the source - it's built on the Octane render-pass convention, so if you've ever worked in a real renderer, the output names will feel familiar rather than invented.

How it works

Marigold IId emits two decompositions: a lighting pass, which is roughly albedo × shading (the color of the surface and how light falls on it), and an appearance pass, which carries the residual - the stuff albedo-and-shading didn't capture, i.e. specular and reflections. The node normalizes both inputs to RGB, then decomposes:

• diffuse_albedo - the surface color with lighting pulled out, gamma-controlled by diffuse_gamma.
• lighting_direct and lighting_indirect - the illumination split, scaled by shading_strength.
• reflection_specular - extracted from the residual using specular_threshold (what counts as a highlight) and specular_strength (how strong it reads).
• ambient_occlusion - derived from shading analysis, with ao_strength; feed the optional normal_map input to get better AO, since occlusion correlates with surface orientation.
• emission - bright regions above emission_threshold, for self-lit pixels (screens, lava, neon).
• beauty_composite - the passes recombined, for a sanity check that nothing was lost.

Each pass has its own threshold or strength control, so you're not stuck with the model's opinion of where a highlight starts.

The inputs that matter

• marigold_lighting and marigold_appearance - from Marigold's IId nodes (Kijai's ComfyUI-Marigold wrapper). Both required.
• specular_threshold - 0.5 default; raise it to keep only strong highlights, lower it to catch more.
• emission_threshold - 0.8 default; only pixels brighter than this count as emissive.
• normal_map - optional but worth wiring if you have one; it improves the AO.

Installing it

Ships with ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy. ComfyUI Manager → search "TextureAlchemy" → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/amtarr/ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy

Restart, look under Texture Alchemist → Lighting. The node has no dependencies, but it's dead without Marigold upstream - install Kijai's ComfyUI-Marigold and a Marigold IId checkpoint. Marigold is the slow-but-quality depth/decomposition option per the KB's depth essay, so budget for it.

Common issues

• "The albedo is too dark or too bright." That's what diffuse_gamma is for - nudge it off 1.0 to taste.
• "Specular shows everywhere or nowhere." You've got specular_threshold set wrong for this particular image. It's a per-image knob, not a set-once-and-forget one.
• "Passes don't seem to add up to the original." They're approximations with thresholds doing the separating, so they won't sum perfectly to the input. beauty_composite is there precisely so you can check how much fidelity survived.
• "I get a 1 or 2-channel output." The node converts grayscale and 2-channel Marigold outputs to RGB automatically, so downstream nodes shouldn't choke.

Honest caveat before you fall in love: this pack is a small, low-profile project - essentially no community footprint on reddit, near-zero page impressions - so you're relying on the author's implementation rather than a battle-tested ecosystem standard. That's fine for a tool this specialized; just keep a Marigold-depth comparison on hand to validate against, and treat the passes as starting points for material work rather than ground truth.