VRGDG UI Multi Reference Conditioning

The canvas-socket version of multi-reference conditioning is great until your references live in a project folder and your workflow has to survive being shared, saved, and re-run weeks later. VRGDG Multi Reference Conditioning From Paths is the "UI friendly" twin of VRGDG Multi Reference Conditioning: instead of wiring image sockets, you type the file paths. Same job - load each reference, scale it, VAE-encode it, and append the reference latents to your positive and negative conditioning - but driven by a text box.

How it works

The single new input is image_paths: a multiline string accepting one path per line, or a JSON list of paths. That's the whole interface difference. Everything else matches its sibling exactly - upscale_method (default nearest-exact), megapixels (default 1), resolution_steps (default 1), and the same positive/negative conditioning plus processed IMAGE outputs. Paths resolve against ComfyUI's input directory, so the same workflow can reference a folder of character stills and re-run cleanly every time.

Why would you pick paths over sockets? Three reasons, all practical. First, the pack's builder writes reference paths into project files - this node is how a saved project round-trips its references without you re-attaching fifty images by hand. Second, path-driven graphs are copy-paste portable: send someone the workflow JSON and the refs load from wherever they dropped the folder. Third, it's just less cable spaghetti when you're running 10+ references for a multi-character scene.

The one tradeoff is that you lose the visual check. With sockets, the node shows you what's connected; with paths, a wrong filename shows up as nothing at all - the tooltip is careful to note paths come "from the UI," and a typo returns an empty reference rather than an error. That's the price of convenience, and it's a fair one for project-driven work.

The inputs that matter

• image_paths - one path per line, or a JSON list. Order matters: it maps to reference order downstream.
• megapixels - target size per reference; 1 default, drop it if VRAM complains.
• positive / negative - your text conditioning, returned with references appended to both.

Install

Pack-wide: ComfyUI Manager → search vrgamedev (or https://github.com/vrgamegirl19/comfyui-vrgamedevgirl), restart, hard-refresh. Manual: git clone https://github.com/vrgamegirl19/comfyui-vrgamedevgirl into custom_nodes, then pip install -r requirements.txt; on Windows portable, install Cython and scikit-build-core first.

Troubleshooting

Silent emptiness is the failure mode to watch: a bad path doesn't error, it just contributes nothing, so if your references appear to have no effect, verify the files actually exist at those paths. Relative paths resolve against the input directory - absolute paths work but break portability. And remember the both-passes behavior from the sibling node: references go into positive and negative, so a junk reference can't be tuned away, only removed.