Viewing and export#

Geometry lives inside the ComfyUI server process, so you look at it through dedicated nodes: an interactive 3D viewport (in a node or in a floating panel driven by Houdini-style display flags), a software-rendered preview image, and a spreadsheet. Cameras are nodes too, shared by every render and projection step. To get results out of ComfyUI you write meshes, instance tables, images, image sequences or geometry caches into the ComfyUI output folder. This page gives an overview of those tools and when to use which.

Looking at geometry#

Viewport and Display pass their input through unchanged, so they can sit in the middle of a chain. Both take an optional template input that is drawn as a grey wireframe for reference, like Houdini's template flag.

Geometry Preview has three looks. Basic is a quick flat-lit render. Studio is meant for pictures you keep: smooth shading, a key light with shadows, sky fill, ambient occlusion, a ground that catches shadows and fades into a gradient background, and supersampled edges. It can also show textures, either files (basecolor = pcg/materials/T_{material}_BaseColor.png, normal = ..., picked per face by a material attribute) or layers straight from a COP chain (basecolor = @basecolor with the COP image connected to textures_cop), using the same tangent frames as Export Mesh, so a baked normal map looks as it will in an engine. Outdoor is an environment shot instead of an object on a studio floor: a perspective camera (a connected Camera, or an automatic 35 mm camera at Elevation / Azimuth), a sky with a sun, sun light with shadows plus sky fill and ground bounce, aerial perspective that fades distant surfaces toward the horizon (Haze), and an optional ground plane to the horizon. It is what makes a street or a valley read at its real scale; the modular city and world tiles examples use it, the asset examples use Studio.

Display flags and the floating panel#

Every node with a geometry output has two small squares above its title bar, on the left: blue is the display flag, grey the template flag.

ComfyUI only executes nodes that lead to an output node, so a flag cannot simply "look at" an intermediate node. Instead, the flag rewires the input of a Display (PCG) node to the flagged node; that wire is the real dependency, and it survives save, undo and copy/paste. A graph needs only one Display node; if there is none, clicking a flag creates one next to the flagged node. If auto re-run is on (the ↻ button in the panel title bar, on by default), clicking a flag also queues the graph; clicks made while a run is in progress are merged into one follow-up run.

The panel floats over the canvas; drag and resize it, and its position, size and shading options are remembered. Title bar buttons: ↻ auto re-run, ⛶ frame everything, ✕ hide. The 3D button in the bottom-right corner of the window shows or hides the panel. The title bar names the node being shown.

Viewport controls#

The same viewer is used by Viewport (PCG) and the floating panel.

Keys act while the pointer is over the view, also when a toolbar menu of the panel still has focus; only a text box being typed in keeps its keys. Display options are front-end only and do not re-run the graph: shading (phong, lambert, normal, color — flat colour without highlights, uv — a UV checker, wire), normals (auto, smooth, vertex, flat), wireframe overlay, points, normals display (point / vertex / prim) and their length, element numbers (point / vertex / prim), grid, group highlight, and attribute visualisation. Like Houdini, the shaded view shows Cd in every mode except normal: a vertex Cd wins over a point Cd, which wins over a primitive Cd, which wins over a detail Cd (that one tints the whole object); attribute visualisation takes precedence over Cd. Curves and point clouds take a point Cd. The point markers of the Points toggle are an overlay on a mesh or a curve and keep their own cyan whatever Cd is; in a point cloud the points are the geometry and show Cd. Polylines and point clouds are drawn as lines and points; volumes are drawn as smoke or iso-surfaces (see Volumes below) and NURBS / Bezier primitives are tessellated for display.

The viewer is built on three.js. It is loaded from web/vendor/three.module.js inside the plugin folder if that file exists, otherwise from a CDN (three.js 0.160.0). On a machine without internet access, put three.module.js (version 0.160.0) into web/vendor/.

UV view#

Press 5 over the view for an orthographic look at the uv layout, like Houdini's UV viewport: the 0–1 tile with a 0.1 grid and its neighbouring tiles, the faces filled translucent (overlapping islands read darker) and the polygon edges drawn in uv space, so seams show as separate edges. Faces wound against the majority — a mirrored island or a fold — are red, and the info bar counts them. A vertex uv wins over a point uv; both size 2 and size 3 work. Left or middle drag pans, right drag or the wheel zooms about the pointer, F or a double-click frames the layout together with the 0–1 tile; 5 again or 1–4 return to the 3D view as you left it. Handles are off in the UV view.

To see the uv on the model, pick the uv shading: a checker, 8 × 8 cells per tile, light cells tinted by position (more red along u, more green along v) with a dark notch in their low-u, low-v corner, so stretching, scale differences and mirrored faces are visible at a glance. Without a uv attribute the model stays grey and the info bar says so.

Volumes#

Volumes are drawn the way Houdini draws them, and Volume Visualization (PCG) changes it per geometry:

Volume Visualization can pick the volumes to draw (Density Field), switch to Rainbow, Iso Surface (at an Iso Value) or Invisible, scale the density and the self-shadowing, colour the smoke with a diffuse field (a scalar through a ramp, or a vector / three scalars as RGB) and add emission. Grids larger than Max Vis Res (128 by default) are resampled for display only. With the wire shading mode volumes show as their bounding boxes.

Smoke is drawn after the solid geometry: geometry in front of a volume hides it, geometry inside a volume shows through the smoke in front of it but is not blended exactly.

Handles#

Select a node in the graph and its handle appears in the view, like Houdini's state handles (no need to press Enter). Nodes with handles: Transform, Soft Transform, Copy and Transform, Clip, Mirror, and the generators Box, Sphere, Grid, Tube, Torus, Circle, Line and Platonic Solids. Curve (PCG) gets the curve drawing tool instead (below). With several nodes selected, the handle belongs to the current node.

A handle only changes the node's parameters, exactly as dragging the numbers in the panel would; the geometry is still computed in Python. While you drag, the graph is queued at most every 120 ms and once more on release, when the panel's Auto is on. Undo, saving and copying nodes work as usual. A parameter that is driven by an expression, a reference or a link is locked (grey, cannot be dragged); a keyframed parameter gets a key at the current frame. Dragging a Clip handle in Direction mode turns on Use Origin, and rotating a Circle turns on its rotate option, because otherwise the values would have no effect.

Selecting#

Press S with the pointer over a viewport (node or panel) to enter select mode; a toolbar appears at the top, Esc leaves it. The selection becomes a group expression that any group field understands.

Numbers refer to the geometry the viewport shows, so the expression belongs on nodes downstream of the node that feeds it. Alt / Space + drag and the middle and right buttons still navigate.

Drawing curves#

Select a Curve (PCG) node to draw in the view. The points are stored in the node's Points field (one x, y, z per line), so they can also be typed or edited by hand.

The curve is shown as a dashed overlay at once; the cooked curve (Polygon, NURBS or Bezier) follows when the graph has run.

Cameras in the panel#

The floating panel has a camera bar. Choose a Camera (PCG) node from the graph to look through it, then:

Writing the view into a camera sets its mode to look_at.

Spreadsheet paging#

When a class has more rows than Max Rows, the Geometry Spreadsheet footer shows page buttons and a row field. Pages come from the server's cache of the last run, so paging through a million points never re-runs the graph and leaves Start Row alone. The panel warns when the view cannot match the render exactly (frame mode, orthographic cameras, an up vector other than +Y).

Cameras#

Cameras are a separate data type so that the view used to render an image and the view used to project it back are the same wire.

Cameras feed Render Pass (PCG), Render Sequence (PCG), Texture Render (PCG), Motion Vectors (PCG), UV Backproject (PCG) and the cams input of For-Each Frame Begin. See Images.

Exporting#

All writers put their files under the ComfyUI output folder; file names are relative to it.

File-name parameters support placeholders such as {index} (and {tx} / {ty} for tiles, {name} for per-attribute files); string fields also accept templates such as out/$F4, which are expanded in the browser before the run.

Importing#

Import Mesh (PCG) reads OBJ, PLY, STL, GLB / glTF and LAS without external libraries (n-gons are kept, UVs go to vertices, PLY point clouds including Gaussian splats are supported); compressed LAZ needs the optional laspy package. Survey-sized LAS coordinates are recentred, with the offset in the las_origin detail attribute. Choose Weld and Up Axis deliberately; the reference explains why. File Merge (PCG) and From JSON (PCG) are the other entry points.

Geometry cache#

Geometry is not saved in the workflow, so after a restart every chain is recomputed on the next run. File Cache (PCG) stores geometry on disk:

When the node reads, the upstream is not executed at all: its input is lazy. The file path (default pcg_cache/geo_$F4.npz) replaces $F / $F4 with the node's Frame value and $V with Version. Frame is not taken from the timeline automatically; connect it from Frame (PCG) or For-Each Frame Begin for per-frame caches. Change Reload to force a new read or write. Files are .npz with a JSON manifest and no pickle, so they are safe to share.

See also#

• Geometry
• Images
• Loops and time
• Reference: Output & Export, Render & View