🔶 Restart & Activ Frame - Advanced

This is the engine room of the whole Chaosaiart animation system, and if you're trying to understand any other 🔶Chaosaiart node without understanding this one first, you're going to have a bad time. Everything else in the pack - the prompt changers, the checkpoint changers, the cache Save/Load pairs - depends on knowing "what frame am I on right now," and this node is the only thing in the pack that answers that question.

The author's own framing, from the original release thread, is the clearest way to think about it: instead of generating a batch of frames at once (which is what eats VRAM), this system generates one image, queues the workflow again, generates the next image using the last one as a starting point, and repeats - "through the caches, the images become self-similar." Restarter Advanced is what drives that repetition. You queue your workflow once, and this node's RESTART output wires back into the pack's Cache Reloader nodes (Any/IMG/Latent Load) to tell them "this isn't the first run, go fetch what was saved last time." Its ACTIV_FRAME output tells frame-aware nodes like the Prompt mixer which frame number is currently active, so prompt or checkpoint changes can kick in at the right point.

Mode is the one field that actually changes behavior in a big way, and it's worth reading carefully before you queue anything: Loop___Restart_at_End cycles back to Start once you hit End and keeps going forever; Endless___1x_Restart_at_End restarts the cache chain once at the end but then runs endlessly past End without looping the frame count; stop_at_End___1x_Restart_at_End and stop_at_End___no_Restart both stop at End, with or without a final cache reset; and Endless___no_Restart just keeps incrementing forever with no reset at all. Start and End are the frame range (frame numbers, not seconds - remember 1 frame = 1 generated image in this system). Version is a plain counter you can bump to force the cache to treat the run as fresh (handy when you've changed your workflow mid-animation and don't want stale cached frames bleeding into new ones). The optional restart input lets you chain multiple restarter nodes or feed in a restart signal from elsewhere instead of managing it purely by frame count.

Outputs: Info (a text readout of current state, useful for sanity-checking what frame you're actually on), ACTIV_FRAME (feed this into chaosaiart_Prompt_mixer_byFrame or the KSampler a1a's activ_frame input), RESTART (feed this into the restart input on any of the six Cache Reloader Load nodes), and REPEAT, which the pack uses elsewhere for count-driven logic you'd wire up as needed.

Installing it is the same across the whole pack: search "Chaosaiart-Nodes" in ComfyUI Manager and install, or use Manager's "Install via Git URL" with https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes. By hand, it's cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/chaosaiart/Chaosaiart-Nodes, then restart ComfyUI. On Linux you also need pip install opencv-python and pip install tqdm (inside your venv if you use one) - the Windows install script handles this for you automatically, Linux doesn't.

The trap almost everyone falls into with this node: nothing happens on a single queue. ComfyUI has to actually re-run the workflow multiple times - via a queue loop, "run forever," or repeated manual queuing - for the frame counter to advance and for the RESTART signal to mean anything. If you queue once and wonder why your img2img chain didn't animate, that's why. Also worth knowing: ACTIV_FRAME, RESTART, and REPEAT are custom types this pack invents for itself, so you can't splice in some other pack's frame-counter node here and expect it to plug in - the whole chain has to stay inside 🔶Chaosaiart nodes.