VAE Selector

The VAE is the part that turns the latent noise your model is actually working in back into an image you can look at - not a colour filter, an actual decoder, and without one there's no picture at all. Get a mismatched VAE and you get the classic symptom everyone's hit at some point: images that come out grey and washed out, because the decode step is producing colours the checkpoint never intended. VAESelectorNode is a small, single-purpose fix for a specific annoyance around that: instead of a VAE dropdown living inside one Load VAE node, this one lets you pick it in a place you can reuse.

It's a dropdown plus a fork. You pick one VAE from the list, and the node hands you back two identical choices in different shapes: one meant to plug straight into a stock Load VAE node's own widget-input, and one as a plain readable string, for anywhere else that just wants text - a label, a filename, or a cell in a comparison grid. Given the pack's origins in XYZ-plot workflows, that second output is clearly there so you can drive both "which VAE actually gets loaded" and "what shows up on the grid label for this cell" off one selection instead of keeping two dropdowns in sync by hand - which matters more than it sounds, because VAE swaps are a genuinely real comparison people run. One documented example: some users found the default VAE on certain DiT-style checkpoints (Qwen-Image-derived models, specifically) produces noticeably over-smoothed output, with a fix being to swap in a different VAE from the same lineage - exactly the kind of A/B test this node is built to make convenient.

The inputs and outputs that matter

One required field:

• vae_name - a dropdown of VAE files ComfyUI finds in your setup. What shows up depends entirely on what's sitting in ComfyUI/models/vae - an install with nothing there shows an empty list, which is a heads-up worth knowing before you assume the node is broken.

Two outputs: vae_name (the raw selection, meant for direct connection into a node like Load VAE) and vae_name_str (a plain STRING version of the same choice, for labeling or concatenating elsewhere in the graph).

How to install it

Through ComfyUI Manager, search "DemonAlone-nodes-ComfyUI." By hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/DemonAlone/SimpeStringGenerator_ComfyUI

then restart. The clone URL keeps the pack's original name, SimpeStringGenerator_ComfyUI; it now presents itself as "DemonAlone-nodes-ComfyUI" - same repo, both names apply. This node doesn't ship or download a VAE itself; it only lists whatever .safetensors/.pt VAE files you've already put in models/vae.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The dropdown is empty. That means you don't have any files in ComfyUI/models/vae yet - drop a VAE in there and restart ComfyUI so it picks up the new file.

Output looks grey or washed out even after selecting a VAE. That's very rarely this node's fault - it's the classic symptom of a VAE that doesn't match your checkpoint's architecture. Baked-in VAEs on SDXL/Flux checkpoints usually cover you automatically; if you're loading a separate VAE file, double-check it's actually built for the model family you're running.

No community footprint to check against. This is a small personal utility with essentially no presence outside its own repository - if the selection isn't behaving, the source is short enough to read directly rather than hunting for a thread about it.