Output Mask Bridge

Don't let the name fool you into thinking this passes a mask through unchanged - that's a different node. RiceRoundOutputMaskBridgeNode takes a MASK in and hands back a STRING, and it's filed under RiceRound's Output category, which in this pack means one thing: it's a debugging aid for checking your work before you publish, not a piece of the workflow you actually ship.

Bridge, but not the passthrough kind

This pack already has a RiceRoundMaskBridgeNode in the Input category - a genuine passthrough that takes a MASK and returns the identical MASK, and whose whole job is marking that specific wire as a RiceRound-recognized input point. This Output-category node shares the "bridge" name and the MASK input, but does something else entirely: rather than passing the mask along untouched, it follows the same pattern as the rest of RiceRound's Output family (Output Boolean, Output Float, and so on) and converts whatever it's given into a readable STRING you can inspect. Same family resemblance, opposite job - worth checking which category you actually grabbed if you're not seeing the behavior you expected.

The input and output that matter

• mask (required, MASK) - the mask you want to check mid-build.
• Output: value (STRING) - a text rendering of that mask, not the mask itself. The README doesn't spell out exactly what the string contains, but it's consistent with every other node in this Output family: typed value in, human-readable STRING out, useful for confirming something looks right before you move on.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "RiceRound," install, restart. Or by hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/RiceRound/ComfyUI_RiceRound

then restart ComfyUI. No dependencies or model downloads are documented in the README - this is a packaging and publishing layer, not a generation pack, so there's nothing heavy to wait on.

Common issues & troubleshooting

You left this in the workflow you're about to publish. Pull it out first. RiceRound's README draws a hard line between the two node families: build your publishable graph from Input-category nodes, and treat everything filed under Output - this one included - as local debugging you strip out before running RiceRound Publish.

You wanted to mark a mid-graph mask as a published input, and this didn't do it. That's RiceRoundMaskBridgeNode, the Input-category node with the near-identical name. This one only reports on a mask; it doesn't flag anything for the publish step.

You expected a MASK back and got a STRING. Expected behavior, not a bug - every node in RiceRound's Output category normalizes its result to a STRING for display, regardless of what type it received. It's a preview tool, not a data-processing step you'd chain further nodes off of.