🔶 Load Checkpoint

Stock ComfyUI makes you drop three separate nodes just to get from "I picked a checkpoint" to "I have something to plug into a KSampler": Load Checkpoint, then two CLIPTextEncode boxes for your positive and negative prompt. Chaosaiart's version of Load Checkpoint folds all three into one node, with a LoRA slot built in. It's not doing anything the stock nodes don't - it's just fewer boxes and fewer wires on your canvas, which matters more than it sounds once a workflow has forty nodes in it.

What it does

Wire a checkpoint in, type your positive and negative prompt into the two text boxes, and you get back everything downstream nodes actually want: a MODEL, the two CONDITIONING outputs already text-encoded, and the VAE. That's the whole txt2img front half of a workflow in one node.

The checkpoint comes from Checkpoint, a dropdown of whatever .safetensors/.ckpt files are sitting in your models/checkpoints folder - same list the stock Load Checkpoint node reads from. positiv_txt and negativ_txt are plain multiline text fields; there's no weighting syntax or special parser here, it's the same prompt text you'd type into any CLIPTextEncode. The optional lora input takes a LORA-type connection from Chaosaiart's own Lora node elsewhere in the pack - it's not a standard ComfyUI type, so you can't feed it a raw LoRA loader from another pack; if you want a LoRA applied here, it has to come from a Chaosaiart Lora node.

On the output side you get MODEL (patched with the LoRA if one's attached), POSITIV and NEGATIV (both CONDITIONING, ready for a KSampler), and VAE. Notice there's no CLIP output. That's fine for a normal txt2img/img2img chain since the prompts are already encoded, but if something downstream needs raw CLIP - an IPAdapter node, GLIGEN, a second custom prompt encoder - you'll need a standalone CLIP loader alongside this one, because this node doesn't expose it.

Why you'd reach for it

If you're building the animation-style workflows this pack is built around - checkpoint swaps mid-sequence, prompt changes on a frame counter - collapsing the loader into one node makes those graphs readable. You end up wiring one box instead of three at every checkpoint-change point, which matters when a workflow has several of them chained together. If you're just doing a single static txt2img image, honestly the stock nodes are fine too; this is a convenience play, not a capability one.

Installing it

Two ways in. Easiest: open ComfyUI Manager, search "Chaosaiart-Nodes" (or use "Install via Git URL" and paste https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes), then restart ComfyUI. Manual route: cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes, then restart. On Linux you also need pip install opencv-python and pip install tqdm (activate your venv first if you're using one) - those aren't needed for this specific node, but the pack installs as a unit and a couple of its other nodes (gif/video handling) will throw import errors without them. Windows users get an Install_windows script bundled in the folder that handles it. No model downloads - bring your own checkpoint.

This is a small, single-maintainer pack (the author, chaosaiart, launched it on r/comfyui back in early 2024 as a low-VRAM animation toolkit) rather than something with a big community around it, so don't expect a busy support thread if something's off - the GitHub issues page and the README are your main resources.

Troubleshooting

The Checkpoint dropdown coming up empty means ComfyUI can't see your models/checkpoints folder or nothing's in it - check your extra_model_paths.yaml if you're using a shared model directory. If the lora input refuses to connect, you're probably trying to plug in a LoRA loader from a different pack; it has to be Chaosaiart's own Lora node, because lora is a pack-specific type, not the generic ComfyUI LoRA wire. And if you need CLIP downstream and can't find an output for it here, that's expected - add a separate Load CLIP or use the stock checkpoint loader alongside this one for that branch.