Playbook Outline Render Pass Sequence

Playbook Outline Sequence is the frame-by-frame version of Playbook Outline. It pulls a zip of outline frames from Playbook3D's cloud and returns them as one batched IMAGE, ready for edge-guided video work. If you're using an edge ControlNet to keep every frame of an animated scene locked to the same structure, this is your input source.

Why use a renderer's outline instead of running Canny on your frames locally? Flicker. Canny thresholds are per-image decisions, and two adjacent frames with slightly different lighting or grain can produce visibly different edge maps - which means your ControlNet guidance wobbles from frame to frame and the output shimmers. Outline passes from a 3D render are derived from geometry, so the edges are consistent frame to frame in a way a pixel-based detector can't match. For video retexturing, that consistency is the whole ballgame.

How it works

Inputs: api_key (required) and run_id (optional). No fallback image - like the other sequence nodes, this one fails loudly instead of degrading.

The mechanism is the pack's standard sequence flow: exchange api_key for a user token, request download URLs (optionally scoped by run_id), and read the outline_zip key out of the response. The node downloads the zip, extracts the images to a temp directory, sorts them by filename, decodes each to a float tensor, and stacks them into a [frames, height, width, channels] batch returned as Images.

Ordering is filename-based, so zero-padded names (outline_0001.png, outline_0002.png…) come back in order; unpadded names sort lexically and 10 lands before 2. If frames look shuffled, fix the naming on the render side - that's the entire sorting mechanism.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/playbook3d/playbook3d-comfyui-nodes

Or search Playbook Nodes in ComfyUI Manager and restart. No models, no extra pip dependencies - standard library zip/tempfile plus ComfyUI's bundled stack. You need the Playbook3D API key and a render with an outline sequence.

Troubleshooting

Failures are loud, as with the other sequence nodes: "API Key not found or incorrect." for auth problems, "No outline zip found for the provided parameters." for a missing sequence (usually an unfinished render or a run_id without one). Check the console for the underlying error before the raise. And since there's no default_value escape hatch, a failed fetch stops the graph - so confirm the render finished in the Playbook3D app before queuing. Once it works, you've got the cleanest edge input for video that this whole ecosystem offers without extra preprocessing.