Pipe In Checkpoint Loader Small + v3

Pipe In Checkpoint Loader Small + v3 is the "write side" of a pipe that carries a loaded model bundle. You feed it model, clip, and vae - the three things a checkpoint loader hands you - plus a batch_size, modelname, and vae_name string, and it packs them all into one pipe output. The matching Pipe Out Checkpoint Loader Small + v3 unpacks them on the far side of your graph.

So the real point isn't this node; it's what the pair does to your workflow. A model load is one of the most re-used blocks in ComfyUI - model, clip, VAE always travel together - and this lets you load it once, put the whole bundle on one wire, and split it back out exactly where the sampler, the VAE decode, and the checkpoint-info node each need their piece. If you've used rgthree's context nodes or Efficiency's pipelines, it's the same "one fat wire instead of three skinny ones" idea, done with a positional tuple.

The mechanism is the standard RvTools merge: the optional incoming pipe supplies the previous values, and any slot you connect overwrites that position while unconnected slots keep what was already riding the bus. Chain one of these after another and you can update just the VAE while leaving the model alone - nice when you're testing a VAE swap without reloading the checkpoint.

Install. ComfyUI Manager → search "RvTools" → install ComfyUI-RvTools_v2, let it pull dependencies, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI-RvTools_v2
# restart ComfyUI afterwards

No model files ship with it - this node doesn't load anything itself, it only carries what you already loaded. Manual clones need pip install -r requirements.txt (opencv-python, pynvml, piexif, Pillow, pilgram).

The catches. The "+ v3" in the name is a naming-history artifact: the pack's README explains the author had to rename every node for v2 to fix how the node library displayed them, and the "+ v3" marks the variant that matches the current checkpoint-loader layout. The bigger thing: this node is flagged DEPRECATED, and the pack as a whole has been superseded by ComfyUI_Eclipse. It works fine in workflows that already use it - deprecation here mostly means "the author moved on." The real trap is slot order: Pipe In … Small + v3 writes a 6-slot tuple, and only the matching "Small + v3" Pipe Out understands it. The 9-slot Pipe Out Checkpoint Loader is a different layout - if you mix In and Out variants the unpack will throw. Check your node names before you wonder why the graph went red.