VAE Passer

The VAE Passer is a node whose entire job is to take a VAE in one socket and hand it out the other. No processing, no logic, no cleverness. If you're new to ComfyUI that sounds useless, and honestly, as a standalone thing it mostly is. It earns its place as part of a bigger graph - and once you've hit the problem it solves, you'll grab it constantly.

Why a pass-through exists at all

ComfyUI's "passer" family comes from the same idea as the primitive nodes: one value, many consumers, no spaghetti. A VAE often needs to reach several places - a tiled decoder, an upscaler, a save node. You can just run multiple wires off the VAE loader socket, and ComfyUI lets you do that. But long runs of wire across a busy canvas are how workflows turn into unreadable bowls of noodles, and the Eclipse pack's answer is the typed passers: drop a VAE Passer near wherever the VAE is needed, run one short wire, and the graph reads like a pipeline instead of a mess.

There's a second, sneakier use. Eclipse has a Node Collector and bridge/relay tools that gather references to nodes across the graph. A passer gives you a clean, typed place to "tap" a value mid-route - wire the loader's VAE into a passer, and now that passer is a stable anchor you can point other tooling at without touching the loader. Same trick works for models, clips, latents, and every other type; this node is the VAE-flavored one.

How it works

Under the hood it's a straight passthrough: the input and output are the same dynamic type (the schema declares COMFY_MATCHTYPE_V3, which just means "whatever VAE you connect"), and the execute function returns exactly what it received. That's the whole mechanism. What you're paying for is the type safety - it won't silently accept an image and hand you garbage, the way a wildcard * passer sometimes will. A VAE in, a VAE out, nothing lost, nothing changed.

Inputs and outputs

There's exactly one input and one output, both named vae. Wire your VAE loader (or VAE output from a checkpoint node) into the input, then pull the output wherever the VAE is needed. That's it. If you convert the input widget you could even chain a couple of passers to visually "reroute" a wire around a crowded area - cosmetic, but people do it.

Install it

ComfyUI_Eclipse is one repo covering all the [Eclipse] nodes. In ComfyUI Manager, search "Eclipse" in the Custom Nodes tab and install, or clone it manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI_Eclipse

Then restart ComfyUI. The pack needs opencv-python, Pillow, pilgram, PyYAML and aiohttp beyond ComfyUI's usual stack; portable installs usually need python_embeded\python.exe -m pip install -r custom_nodes/ComfyUI_Eclipse/requirements.txt. You'll find this node under Eclipse → Router → Typed.

Gotchas

The main one is knowing it exists at all - passers don't advertise themselves. The other is that a passer doesn't make anything run differently; if you're debugging "why is my VAE wrong", a passer is the last place to look. It can't corrupt anything, but it also can't fix anything. It's plumbing, and good plumbing is invisible. If you're staring at a 40-node graph wondering why you can't find anything, this is the kind of node that quietly saves your sanity rather than making headlines.