SP_Name_Vae

The VAE is the component that converts between the pixels you actually see and the latent space a diffusion model works in - it's also, less obviously, an architecture-specific piece: a VAE trained for one model's latent space produces noise or flat color if you decode a different model's latents through it, and even within a compatible family, swapping VAEs is a real quality lever people reach for on purpose (the Qwen-Image VAE getting swapped for the Wan 2.1 one to fix over-smoothing is a documented example of exactly this). Given how much rides on "which VAE," SP_Name_Vae does something small but genuinely useful: it picks one from your VAE folder and gives you its filename as plain text, no loading required.

Why you'd want just the name

Two real uses fall out of that VAE-compatibility fact above. First, self-documenting output: if you're testing a checkpoint against a couple of candidate VAEs (baked-in versus a separate .safetensors, or comparing known-good options for a given architecture), tagging each batch with the VAE filename saves you from reconstructing which combination produced which result later. Second, cheap validation logic: since a mismatched VAE is one of the more common "why do my images look washed out or full of noise" problems, having the VAE's name available as data - for a log, a conditional check, or just a label baked into the output filename - is worth more here than for some of this pack's other SP_Name_* siblings.

Inputs and outputs that matter

• name - a dropdown populated from your VAE models folder.
• Output: STRING - the selected filename.

How to install it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "SP-Nodes," install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/bananasss00/ComfyUI-SP-Nodes

Restart ComfyUI once it's cloned. No extra dependency for this node itself.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Dropdown is empty. Many checkpoints bake their VAE in and don't need a separate file at all, so an empty folder here isn't necessarily wrong - it only matters once you've deliberately downloaded a standalone VAE (the classic SD 1.5 case being vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned for washed-out output).

Recently added VAE file isn't showing up. Same startup-scan issue as the rest of the SP_Name_* family - restart ComfyUI after adding files to the folder.

This node won't fix washed-out or noisy images by itself. It only ever returns a filename - selecting the "right" name here doesn't load or apply anything. If your actual problem is grey, desaturated output, you need a real VAE Loader wired into your VAE Decode with the correct file for your checkpoint's architecture; this node is for recording or branching on that choice elsewhere in the graph, not for fixing the pipeline itself.