VULCA Brief (Create)

VULCA Brief is the front door of the ComfyUI-VULCA pack. Everything else in the pack - Concept, Generate, Update, even Evaluate - reads whatever file this node writes. If you're building one of those "brief-driven" workflows, this is where you start: you type a sentence of intent, and it becomes a structured brief saved to disk that the rest of the pipeline treats as its source of truth.

The idea is refreshingly practical. Instead of pasting a prompt into a sampler and hoping, you first pin down what you're making and why - then the generation and evaluation nodes do their thing against that fixed reference. If you're grading AI art for cultural accuracy, you need the intent recorded before you judge the result. This node is that recording.

How it works

Under the hood it's a thin wrapper over the vulca Python SDK. It builds a Brief object from your text, runs an intent-parsing phase that auto-detects cultural traditions from the words you used, and saves the result as brief.yaml in a project directory. The output named brief_path is actually that directory - the downstream nodes load brief.yaml out of it, so don't expect a file path ending in .yaml on the wire.

The pack defaults to writing briefs into your system temp dir (vulca-comfyui), unless you set the VULCA_PROJECT_DIR environment variable. Set that variable if you ever want your briefs to survive a reboot in a predictable place.

Inputs that matter

• intent (required, multiline) - the one you actually write. "Zen garden at dawn, watercolor style." This is the whole creative brief in a sentence.
• must_have and must_avoid - comma-separated lists. This is the gotcha: the node literally splits these on commas, so "misty mountains, koi pond" is two items, not one phrase with a comma in it.
• mood and tradition - optional single strings. Leave tradition blank and the intent parser tries to pick one for you.

That's it. One output, brief_path, which you wire into VULCA Concept, VULCA Generate, or VULCA Update.

Install

The pack is tiny and has no model downloads - it's a wrapper around the vulca SDK. Easiest route is ComfyUI Manager (search "VULCA"). Or the manual way:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/vulca-org/comfyui-vulca
pip install "vulca>=0.12.0"

Restart ComfyUI. Note that the clone URL redirects to the repo's current canonical name (vulca-comfyui-visual-nodes); either slug lands on the same code.

Where people get burned

The imports are lazy - the node appears in your menu even when vulca isn't installed, then throws ModuleNotFoundError: vulca the moment you run it. That's the "forgot the pip install" signature. Also, if your brief_path points into a temp directory that got cleaned between sessions, downstream nodes will fail to find the brief. Set VULCA_PROJECT_DIR and you're done fighting it. This node runs locally and keyless, so it's a safe first test of the whole pack.