Object Vertex Group New With Name

If you're rigging an avatar in Avatar Graph, this is the node you'll reach for before almost any other. Vertex groups are what tie the mesh to the morphs - the pack's shape-key system drives things like eye blinks and mouth shapes through named groups like EyeBlinkLeft or JawOpen - and you have to create a group before you can do anything to it. Object Vertex Group New With Name is exactly that: a named group, created in one step.

It's also one of the few vertex-group nodes in this pack that isn't auto-generated from Blender's API. Someone wrote it by hand, and it shows in the one input that actually matters: a free-text name.

How it works

It creates a new vertex group on the incoming BPY_OBJ with the name you type, and - here's the part that saves you a step - it can assign the currently selected vertices to that group automatically.

• name - the group's name (default Group; you'll want to change that).
• assign_selected - default true. With selection present, the new group starts populated. With nothing selected, you get an empty group, which is sometimes exactly what you want: a placeholder to fill in later with Object Vertex Group Assign or Remove From ops.

The node runs in edit mode (so it works against whatever vertices are selected on the object), then hands the same BPY_OBJ back. Output is that same object, so you can immediately chain into weight editing, smoothing, or the shape-key nodes that consume these groups.

The naming convention matters here. The pack's shape-key machinery looks up groups by name, so keeping names meaningful (EyeBlinkLeft, JawOpen) instead of Group.001 will save you from squinting at an export later.

Installing it

It ships in the Avatar Graph pack:

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

Restart ComfyUI, or search "Avatar Graph" in ComfyUI Manager. Watch the environment before you do: bpy==3.6.0 only works on Python 3.10 (the README suggests a dedicated conda env), and bpy is a full headless Blender, so the install is a chunky download.

Common issues

The big one is selection. assign_selected defaults to on, so if your graph expects an empty group but something upstream left vertices selected, you get a populated group you didn't plan on. Flip assign_selected to false when you want a clean slate.

And the usual Avatar Graph gotcha: this node does nothing without a real BPY_OBJ from an upstream mesh node like Create Mesh Layer or Join Meshes. No object in, no group out.