🔶 Restart & Activ Frame

ComfyUI nodes are supposed to be stateless - same inputs in, same output out, every queue run. A handful of nodes in this pack quietly break that rule on purpose: Number Counter remembers where it left off, the batch loaders remember which image index they're on. This node is the manual override for all of them - the one dial that says "no, actually, start over."

What it does

There's exactly one field: Version, an integer starting at 0 with no upper bound worth worrying about. You don't animate this from within the workflow - you bump it by hand (or drive it from outside ComfyUI's normal execution) whenever you want the stateful nodes downstream to reset. Two outputs carry that signal to the rest of the pack: RESTART, which plugs into the optional restart input on nodes like Number Counter and the Load Image Batch nodes, telling them to snap back to their starting value instead of continuing from wherever they were; and ACTIV_FRAME, which plugs into the required activ_frame input on the animation KSamplers (img2video/txt2video) and the optional activ_frame2index input on Load Image Batch - this is the thing that keeps the frame counter, the image loader, and the sampler all agreeing on "which frame are we currently generating" instead of drifting out of sync with each other. A third output, Info, is a plain string status readout.

Both RESTART and ACTIV_FRAME are pack-specific wire types - they only connect to the matching Chaosaiart nodes that expect them, not to anything in stock ComfyUI or another pack.

Why you'd reach for it

You need this node the moment any part of your workflow relies on the pack's frame-by-frame animation trick - chained img2img generation, one frame per queue run, instead of a real motion model. That whole approach depends on nodes remembering their position across runs, and remembering-across-runs is useless without a way to deliberately break the chain and start a new sequence. Bump Version whenever you're starting a fresh animation, changing the source material, or just want a clean slate without restarting ComfyUI itself. If you're not touching any of the animation or counter nodes, you don't need this at all - it exists purely to serve them.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "Chaosaiart-Nodes," or "Install via Git URL" with https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes, then restart ComfyUI. Manually: cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes, restart. Linux needs pip install opencv-python and pip install tqdm (venv active first) for the pack to import without errors - this specific node doesn't use either, but the pack loads as one module. Windows has a bundled Install_windows script. Nothing to download model-wise.

Troubleshooting

If your animation frames aren't restarting when you expect - the counter keeps climbing, the image loader keeps advancing from an old index - check that RESTART is actually wired into every node downstream that needs it. It's easy to connect it to one node in a chain and forget the other two. If bumping Version does nothing at all, remember ComfyUI generally only re-runs nodes whose inputs actually changed - an unchanged Version value won't trigger anything, so make sure you're incrementing it, not just re-queueing. And keep in mind this is a niche, single-maintainer pack (launched by its author on r/comfyui back in early 2024, without much community traffic since) - if the restart/activ-frame wiring behaves unexpectedly on a newer ComfyUI build, the GitHub issues page is a more useful first stop than a forum search.