VELVET VICE KREA — Render This Stage

"VELVET VICE KREA - Render This Stage" is the most deceptive node in the pack, because it has literally no inputs and no outputs. You can't wire anything to it. It's a UI controller - a panel of buttons in the workflow that queues just one stage of the CREATE pipeline instead of the whole graph. Base, Refinement, the active Detailer, or the final SeedVR2 pass: click the button, and only that part renders.

Why that's actually useful

The Krea 2 workflow is long - base sampler, refinement sampler, optional detailers, then a SeedVR2 upscale - and you don't want to re-run all of it every time you tune the refinement prompt. The official Krea 2 ComfyUI release taught people to live in bypass groups for exactly this reason. This node is the ergonomic version: it uses ComfyUI's partial-execution path to queue only the existing preview output nodes for the stage you clicked. No graph rewiring, no manually bypassing half the canvas.

Look at the source and you'll see the mapping. The node's frontend (web/js/stage_runner.js) targets preview nodes by title - "CREATE - BASE PREVIEW • FIRST SAMPLER," "CREATE - REFINEMENT PREVIEW • SECOND SAMPLER," "CREATE - FINAL PREVIEW" - plus a set of named detailer review previews (face, hand, and the anatomical ones). Click a stage and it calls queuePrompt with queueNodeIds limited to that target. ComfyUI resolves just that node's upstream dependencies. That's the same mechanism as "Queue Selected Output Nodes," automated into buttons.

The catch: it has to find the previews

Because the targeting is by node title, this node only works inside the stock Velvet Vice Krea workflow where those preview nodes exist and are named exactly right. Rename a preview node and "Render This Stage" quietly loses it - the button will tell you the stage is "bypassed or unavailable." It also skips disabled stages by design: if a detailer group is bypassed, the Detailer button says so and does nothing. You can't use this node to force a stage that's switched off.

The README is explicit that normal full-workflow execution is not rewired - this node doesn't intercept anything. It's purely a shortcut. If you've been running the whole graph to iterate on one stage, that's the workflow being inefficient; this is the fix.

Installing

Standard pack install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Velvet-Vice/velvet-vice-krea

Restart ComfyUI, or search "VELVET VICE - KREA" in ComfyUI Manager. The buttons live in the web directory, so make sure the frontend extension loaded - if the node appears but the buttons don't, a browser hard-refresh usually fixes a stale extension cache. No pip dependencies.

When to reach for it

Iterating on refinement? Click Refinement, not Queue. Troubleshooting a base-image problem? Run Base alone and skip the rest. The biggest win is on SeedVR2: you can re-run just the final upscale to fiddle with SeedVR2 settings without touching the diffusion passes at all. It's a small quality-of-life node, but in a workflow this long, it's the difference between "tweak and wait two minutes" and "tweak and wait ten."