📥 Checkpoint Download

This is the "I found a model on Civitai and I just want to use it now" node. Paste the download URL, give it a filename, run - it downloads the checkpoint and loads it in one shot, handing you the three things a checkpoint contains: the diffusion MODEL, the CLIP, and the VAE. No leaving ComfyUI to download by hand, no dropping the file in the right folder and restarting. It's ComfyUI's standard checkpoint loader with a downloader bolted onto the front.

What "checkpoint" means here

A checkpoint is the complete model in one file - every weight needed to turn a prompt into an image, plus the text encoder and the VAE, all bundled. It's the thing everyone means when they say "model." That's why this node has three outputs and the VAE/UNET download nodes each have one: a checkpoint is all three components together. SD 1.5 and SDXL models are almost always distributed this way. (Flux-era models usually split the pieces apart, which is when you'd reach for the separate UNET/CLIP/VAE download nodes instead.)

The inputs and outputs that matter

Two inputs, both simple:

• Download_url - a Civitai or Hugging Face link. The SDVN downloaders accept the model page address or a direct download link, so paste whichever you copied.
• Ckpt_url_name - the filename to save as, e.g. dreamshaper_8.safetensors. Change it from the default model.safetensors so your models folder doesn't fill up with files all named the same thing.

Outputs are MODEL, CLIP, and VAE - wire them exactly as you would from a regular Load Checkpoint node: MODEL into the sampler, CLIP into your text encode, VAE into the decode.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search SDVN_Comfy_node, install, restart. By hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/StableDiffusionVN/SDVN_Comfy_node

Then pip install -r custom_nodes/SDVN_Comfy_node/requirements.txt from your ComfyUI root, and restart. Windows and macOS need aria2c installed manually - it's the accelerated downloader these nodes lean on.

Where people get burned

Grab the safetensors build, not the .ckpt. When a model offers both, always take .safetensors. A .ckpt file is a Python pickle, and loading one runs whatever code is embedded in it - downloading a .ckpt is functionally downloading an executable. safetensors is just a header plus raw bytes with no code path on load. Same image quality, none of the risk. This matters more than usual here because you're pasting URLs from wherever.

Merges vs fine-tunes. If you're model-shopping, know that most of what's on Civitai is merges - averaged weights - which is why so many models converge on the same faces and inherit the same defects. Fine-tunes (trained on new data) tend to stay more coherent. Not this node's job to tell them apart, but it's worth knowing what you're downloading.

Download failed. The usual suspects: missing aria2c on Windows/macOS, or a gated/login-walled URL. Some Civitai downloads need an API key appended to the link. The console logs what it tried to fetch.