Aholo World Generate

Aholo World Generate doesn't generate anything. It books a job.

It's the first half of the official Aholo "Spatial Gen" pipeline: you give it a text prompt, a reference image, or both, and it fires a request at Aholo's cloud - POST /world/v1/generations - then hands you back a world_id. The actual 3D space gets built on their servers, not on your GPU. You want this node when the job is a whole scene, not an asset: an explorable environment (an abandoned factory, a forest clearing, a room) that comes back as gaussian splatting and a 360 panorama, the "make me a set" flavor of 3D generation rather than the "make me a mesh" one. And you want it when you don't have the hardware or the patience for the local route - no compiled CUDA extensions, no VRAM budget, no Hunyuan3D install fight. You've got internet and an API key.

The name isn't the only lie. Despite being a 3D-generation node, this pack has zero model files and doesn't need torch on your machine - its whole dependency list is three manycore-aholo-sdk-* client packages. Under the hood it's an HTTP client wearing a ComfyUI hat, exactly the API-wrapper pattern covered in the KB's external-api-nodes.md: the node validates, authenticates, uploads, and submits, and a closed cloud model does the rest.

The inputs that matter

There are only five, and you'll touch four:

• prompt - your text description, multiline. Good prompting matters; the README's example prompt for an abandoned factory interior is a solid template for how much spatial detail to give it (ceiling, light, surfaces, what's outside the window).
• image - optional, and the star feature: one reference image that anchors the scene (it gets uploaded to Aholo's asset store and sent as a resources[].url).
• region - cn by default, com for the global endpoint. This one bites people. If you're outside China and leave it at cn, your key from labs.aholo3d.com won't work.
• api_key - leave it empty and the node reads the AHOLO_API_KEY environment variable. Set the env var once and forget the field.
• name - a display name for the world. Truly optional; skip it.

The one rule worth memorizing: prompt and image can't both be empty - the node validates that and tells you off. Its only output is world_id, a string, which wires straight into the Wait node's world_id input. That's the whole dance: Generate → Wait.

Installing it

Two ways, both standard:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/manycoretech/ComfyUI-Aholo-World-Generate.git
cd ComfyUI-Aholo-World-Generate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then restart ComfyUI - the nodes appear under Aholo/World. ComfyUI Manager users can just search "Aholo World Generate" (publisher manycoretech) and install from there. One hard requirement the README is blunt about: this is a ComfyUI V3 pack and needs ComfyUI >= 0.3.0 with comfy_api support. On an older install it won't load at all, so upgrade ComfyUI first.

Where people get burned

Getting an API key is step zero: labs.aholo3d.cn/api-keys (China) or labs.aholo3d.com/api-keys (global). The pack's own launch post on r/comfyui got exactly two comments of substance, both of them about this - "API key :(" and "Where do we get the free API keys?" - so you're not alone in finding the key-gating the friction point.

The rest is the usual API-node territory: every run costs you credits, your prompt and reference image leave the machine and hit Aholo's servers (with their moderation), and the node is a third-party pack that ships a credential and phones home by design - read what a fresh pack does before you trust it, the same advice as for every wrapper in this category. Keep the region consistent between Generate and Wait, remember the env var, and this node's only job - submit and hand over a world_id - is done.