Object Set Empty Image Depth

A small, specific Blender-operator wrapper inside Avatar Graph, avatech.ai's ComfyUI pack for rigging flat character illustrations into interactive avatars. This node sets the "depth" behavior of a Blender Empty object that's displaying an image - the setting that controls whether that image draws in front of or behind other 3D geometry in the scene.

What an "Empty Image" is doing in an avatar rig

Blender Empties can be set to display an image instead of the usual axes icon, which makes them a common way to keep a flat reference picture visible in a 3D scene - exactly the situation here, where your source character illustration sits as a visual reference behind or alongside the mesh parts (eyes, mouth) being built and rigged around it. Blender's own Depth setting for this decides how that image plane interacts with everything else drawn in the viewport or render: whether it always draws in front regardless of actual 3D position, always draws behind, or sorts normally by depth like a real object would. Get it wrong and your reference image either obscures the mesh you're trying to inspect, or disappears behind it when you don't want it to.

Inputs and outputs

Two inputs, both optional: BPY_OBJ (the Empty object you're adjusting) and value, a plain string field defaulting to "DEFAULT". It's worth being precise here since this node exposes the setting as free text rather than a dropdown: in vanilla Blender this is normally a fixed choice between something like Default, Front, and Back. Because this node takes a raw string instead of an enum, there's no validation catching a typo before it reaches the operator - type it exactly as Blender expects or the setting won't apply the way you intend. Output is the same BPY_OBJ back out, unchanged except for this one display setting.

Installing it

Search avatar-graph-comfyui in ComfyUI Manager, or clone it yourself:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/avatechai/avatar-graph-comfyui
cd avatar-graph-comfyui && python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Like every node in this pack, this one only exists because of bpy - Blender running as a plain pip-installed Python module - and bpy is locked to Python 3.10.x. That's the constraint to plan around before anything else: the README ships a dedicated Python 3.10 ComfyUI build for Windows specifically for this pack, and recommends a fresh conda environment pinned to 3.10 on Mac/Linux rather than trying to bolt this onto a newer Python you're already running. Once installed, restart with --enable-cors-header if you want the live avatar preview panel to talk to editor.avatech.ai; skip it and the graph still executes, you just export a .glb/.gltf instead of getting the live preview.

Troubleshooting

If the depth setting doesn't seem to take effect, double-check the exact spelling and casing of what you typed into value - since it's a raw string field, a value Blender doesn't recognize as one of its own options simply won't do anything, with no error surfaced. Beyond that, this is a niche enough node that there's no dedicated community discussion of it to point to - Avatar Graph made its noise back in October 2023 and has been mostly dormant since, with the README's original "still making changes" warning never removed. For anything this specific, the pack's own Discord is the realistic place to ask rather than searching general ComfyUI forums.