toobusy MiniMax H3 Optional Reference

MiniMax H3 builds its character sheets off numbered <Picture N> slots: you hand it a face, an outfit, a pose, and whatever else, and it keeps the bits you told it to keep. But you don't always want every slot filled. Maybe the prop reference is a "maybe." Maybe you're iterating on two versions of a sheet and one has a weapon and the other doesn't. Rebuilding the graph each time is exactly the chore the toobusy pack exists to kill.

This node is that toggle. It's a lazy on/off gate for one optional H3 reference - an image plus a short text line describing its role. Turn it off and the whole reference quietly stops existing. Turn it on and both outputs come alive.

How it works

The trick is ComfyUI's lazy execution. Most nodes compute their inputs as soon as they're connected, whether or not you use the result. This one declares a check_lazy_status that only asks for its image input when enabled is on. So a disabled branch - the LoadImage, the Gemma analysis pass, whatever's feeding that socket - never evaluates. No wasted decode, no wasted VRAM, no "why is my graph running a vision model on an image I'm not using." The name isn't marketing: a disabled reference is simply never evaluated.

The inputs that matter

Only three, and two of them are the whole node:

• enabled - a boolean, default false. A freshly dropped node does nothing until you flip this. That's deliberate, and it's the first thing that bites people.
• role - multiline text saying what the reference is for ("Picture 2 = the prop held in panel 3"). This becomes the role line verbatim.
• image - the actual reference image. Optional and lazy; leave it unwired and the node still works as a pure text passthrough.

The outputs

• optional_image - the image passed straight through when enabled, otherwise null. Wire it into your H3 reference slot.
• active_role_line - formats as OPTIONAL REFERENCE ROLE: <role> when enabled with a role typed, otherwise an empty string. Wire it into the reference prompt text you're feeding H3.

Installing it

The node ships in the toobusy pack, which is one clone with no Python dependencies for the reference nodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/nicekriss/toobusy.git toobusy

Restart ComfyUI, then hard-refresh the browser (Ctrl+Shift+R) so the frontend picks up the new nodes. ComfyUI Manager finds it as "toobusy" if you prefer that route. This node itself installs nothing extra - but it's useless without H3 weights on the box and a reference-capable path (MiniMaxH3ReferenceToVideo) downstream.

Where people get burned

The default is off. Wire an image, see nothing happen, and wonder if it's broken - that's it working as designed. Flip enabled. Second: when disabled, active_role_line is an empty string, so don't build a prompt that assumes text will always be there. And keep in mind it's pure routing - it makes no latent and loads no model, it just decides whether a branch runs and passes two values through. That's the whole job, and it does it without costing you a frame.