🌈 Preset Color Animations

Preset Color Animations is the color counterpart to Scheduled Values. Scheduled Values animates numbers; this one animates color. Pick a preset palette, and it outputs a color that shifts over your frames - wire it into a Font Properties color slot and your text cycles through, say, a rainbow or a fire gradient as it plays.

Why you'd reach for it

Color-cycling text is one of those effects that's a pain to do by hand and instantly reads as "animated." Rather than make you keyframe individual colors (which is fiddly), the author baked in a set of curated palettes. You pick one, set a duration, done. It's the low-effort way to get animated color on your captions.

The inputs that matter

Only three, and they're all straightforward:

• color_preset - the palette. Eight options: rainbow, sunset, grey, ocean, forest, fire, sky, earth. rainbow is the default and the flashiest; the others are more tasteful gradients.
• animation_duration - how many frames one pass through the palette takes. Shorter is a faster cycle.
• animation_reset - when the cycle restarts: word, line, never (one pass, hold the last color), looped (endless), or pingpong (forward then back). For per-word caption color, word is the natural choice.

The output is scheduled_colors (a string encoding the color-per-frame schedule). It connects to a Font Properties color property that you've converted to an input - currently font_color, border_color, or shadow_color, on either the main font or the highlight font.

A nice combination worth knowing: point one Preset Color Animation at your main font's font_color and a second at the highlight_font you feed the Text to Image Generator, and the active word cycles through a different palette than the rest of the line. That's how you get the caption-with-a-glowing-current-word look with almost no manual keyframing.

Installing it

Part of the Mana Nodes pack. ComfyUI Manager → search Mana Nodes → install → restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ForeignGods/ComfyUI-Mana-Nodes.git

Install requirements and restart. Nothing to download beyond the pack.

Common issues

Same trap as Scheduled Values: you have to convert the color property to an input on Font Properties before this node has anything to plug into. Right-click Font Properties, "Convert font_color to input," then wire scheduled_colors in. If the color never changes, this is almost always why.

The bigger limitation is the presets themselves - there are exactly eight, and no custom-gradient option. If none of them fit your look, you're a bit stuck; the author openly lists "find a better way to define color animations" as a to-do, so this node is more of a convenient starting point than a full color-animation system. For a fixed (non-animated) color, skip this node entirely and just type a color keyword directly into Font Properties' font_color widget.