VaeClamp

VaeClamp takes a VAE in and hands the same VAE back. It doesn't clamp anything - no value ranges, no processing, a pure pass-through. Which is a weird thing to ship a node for, until you count how many places a single VAE wires into.

What it's for

One VAE typically fans out to several sites: a VAEDecode for the final image, another for a preview or detailer pass, a VAEEncode for an img2img branch, sometimes a second decode for a mask preview. Each of those taps wants a clean connection, and tapping five lines off one VAELoader is exactly how graphs get unreadable. VaeClamp gives the VAE wire a named anchor - title it "main vae" - and a tidy branch point that all the decode sites hang off.

It also solves the practical annoyance that a VAE wire is invisible plumbing: no preview, no label, nothing on the line to say what it is. A clamp turns that into a named node you can grab, reroute, and title. Same graph-organization instinct as a reroute node, but for an object type that primitives can't hold. And since the VAE is just a reference flowing down the wire, the pass-through costs nothing - same object in, same object out.

How it works

The implementation is def node(self, vae): return (vae,). Nothing is copied or converted, so there's no way to corrupt the VAE and no measurable performance cost. VaeClamp is one of 13 pass-through clamps in Allor's "clamp" family (MODEL, LATENT, IMAGE, MASK, CONDITIONING and friends all get one), so the pattern is consistent across every heavy wire.

Input: vae (VAE, required). Output: VAE. That's the whole contract.

Installing Allor

VaeClamp lives in the Allor Plugin, Nourepide's ~90-node image-processing pack. Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "Allor") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Nourepide/ComfyUI-Allor

Restart ComfyUI. First run creates a config.json in the pack folder; the bundled install.sh / install.bat install requirements into your venv or embedded Python. The pack's dependencies (rembg, onnx, plus onnxruntime via rembg) exist for its segmentation nodes - this pass-through doesn't touch them.

Common issues

The pack's known pain point is updating. Its history was rebased to strip image files, the README warns auto-updates can break, and users report Allor nodes silently vanishing after an update. A fresh re-clone is the reliable fix; "update_frequency": "never" in config.json sidesteps it.