Paint a plate: open-source VFX edits in ComfyUI, our Open Source Higgsfield entry

Paint a plate is our entry in Comfy's Open Source Higgsfield contest: an open-source app for VFX artists that is built on top of ComfyUI. You paint on the first frame of a plate, the filmed footage a VFX shot starts from, to erase something, add something or relight the scene. The edit then carries through every frame of the shot. Today we submit it, publish its code under Apache 2.0 and share the two-minute demo.

🎬 Watch the demo

The demo runs two minutes, the contest's limit. It loads a plate and an EXR sequence with their colour management, erases a skidoo, sets a Martian plate into a new environment, relights a lighthouse, adds a coffee and a cat in layers on a train plate, and paints a wildfire from a blank plate.

🖌️ What you can do with it

  • Load a plate or an EXR sequence. The player works like OpenRV, the open-source review player of the VFX industry, with colour management through OpenColorIO (OCIO), the industry's colour standard.
  • Clean up the plate. Paint over what has to go. SAM 3.1 finds the object and tracks it through the shot, and the erase follows it.
  • Add new elements. Paint where the element goes and type what it is. FLUX 3 Image Klein makes it on the first frame, and LTX 2.5 carries it through the shot.
  • Relight the scene. Give the first frame a new light, a sunset or a night look for example, and the shot follows.
  • Work in layers. Each edit is a layer in a history that you can change, bypass or undo. Nothing is destructive.
  • Export with a matte. The shot comes back in the plate's own format, EXR in and EXR out, with a matte: a black-and-white image of what changed, ready for compositing. The pixels you did not touch stay identical.
  • Start from a blank plate. Paint flat colour keyframes for smoke or fire, and ainvfx-fluid, our own IC-LoRA, turns them into a fluid shot.
  • Open it in ComfyUI. Every scene exports as one ComfyUI graph that runs on its own.

⚙️ How it works: open models, one job each

Paint a plate is a ComfyUI node pack of 12 nodes, plus a web page that ComfyUI serves. All of its GPU work runs as ComfyUI workflows, written by a script. It uses open-weight models only, with no partner nodes and no closed APIs:

  • FLUX 3 Image Klein, from Black Forest Labs, edits the first frame. Its prompt writer, Qwen3.5 9B, writes the caption of each edit.
  • SAM 3.1, from Meta, finds and tracks the object you paint on.
  • LTX 2.5, from Lightricks, carries the edit through the shot with three IC-LoRAs. An IC-LoRA is a small add-on that teaches LTX one task from examples: in-outpainting, from Lightricks, for an erase; Ripple, from WepeNerd, for paint and light; and ainvfx-fluid, from AInVFX, for fluid shots.

The demo stays open too. Its music was generated in ComfyUI with ACE-Step, an open-weight music model, and its title cards are drawn by code.

💻 Install it

Paint a plate needs ComfyUI v0.43.0 or newer, the ComfyUI-LTXVideo nodes and an NVIDIA GPU. We recommend 32 GB of VRAM or more, and we tested it there. The repository describes three ways to install it:

  1. With ComfyUI Manager (recommended). Search for Paint a plate, or for its id, ainvfx-paintaplate, and install it with ComfyUI-LTXVideo. With comfy-cli: comfy node install ainvfx-paintaplate.
  2. By hand. Clone the repository and ComfyUI-LTXVideo into ComfyUI's custom_nodes folder.
  3. On Runpod, for a smaller card or a Mac. One script installs the tested ComfyUI, downloads the models and starts it, in about 3 minutes.

Our 23 test plates are on Hugging Face, all synthetic and under CC BY 4.0, so you can try it right away.

📜 Licences

Paint a plate's code is under Apache 2.0: you can read it, change it and use it in your pipeline. The models keep their own licences. LTX 2.5 and its IC-LoRAs follow the LTX-2.x Community License, which asks for a paid licence from 10 million USD of yearly revenue. SAM 3.1 follows the SAM License. FLUX 3 Image Klein is free for commercial use under 5 million USD of yearly revenue. This is a summary, not legal advice: read each model card before use.

🤝 Try it and tell us

Open source works best when people use it and report what fails. Install Paint a plate, paint your own plates, and tell us what breaks and what is missing, on our Discord or in the repository's issues. If you share your shots, tag #OpenSourceHiggsfield. Comfy announces the winners on 6 November. Come build with us!

❓ Questions we often get

Does it run on my GPU? We recommend 32 GB of VRAM or more. We tested it on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 with 32 GB and an RTX PRO 6000 with 96 GB. On a smaller card or a Mac, use the Runpod route.

Does it work with EXR and ACES? Yes. It reads EXR sequences and writes EXR back, through OpenColorIO. It uses your own OCIO config when the OCIO variable is set, and otherwise its built-in ACES studio config.

Do my files leave my machine? Not when you run it locally: the models run in your own ComfyUI, on your own GPU.

Can I see what it does in ComfyUI? Yes. Every scene exports as one ComfyUI graph, which you can open, study and run on its own.

Is it free? The code is free under Apache 2.0. The models' licences are in the section above.

🔗 Sources & Links

🖌️ Paint a plate:

🏆 The contest:

🧠 Models and tools:

🎞️ Footage:

💬 Community:

📄 Related Posts:

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