Paint a plate wins Open Weights Only at Open Source Higgsfield, the ComfyUI contest

On 10 November, Comfy announced the winners of its Open Source Higgsfield contest. Paint a plate won the Open Weights Only category and the “VFX Workflow Built with LTX” bonus. Paint a plate is our open-source app for VFX artists, built on top of ComfyUI: you paint on the first frame of a plate, and the edit carries through the whole shot. Thank you to everyone who tested it, shared it and told us what to improve.

The winners from the Builder Nights in San Francisco
The winners from the Builder Nights in San Francisco (© Comfy).

🎬 Watch Paint a plate at work

This is our four-minute showcase. Every clip was generated live with the app. Comfy's own winner announcement video plays at the top of its contest page.

🏆 The result

The contest asked builders to make open-source apps with ComfyUI in two weeks. According to Comfy's announcement, more than 300 builders from more than 45 countries delivered a project, and three Builder Nights took place in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Paint a plate received two awards:

  • Open Weights Only, one of the three category awards. The prize is a GeForce RTX 5090.
  • VFX Workflow Built with LTX, one of the ecosystem bonuses. The prize is 2,000 USD. In Paint a plate, LTX 2.5 carries every edit through the shot.

It was also one of the three winners of the San Francisco Build Night on 28 October.

Congratulations to the other winners:

Comfy's page also lists the other ecosystem bonuses and ten honorable mentions. Every project is open source, so you can run each one and change it.

🔓 What open weights mean for a studio

A model has open weights when its file is published: you download it and run it on your own machine. Every model in Paint a plate has open weights. For a studio, this changes three things:

  • Your plates stay with you. Paint a plate runs locally, or on a cloud GPU that you rent. No plate goes to a closed service.
  • You can train add-on models on your own material. ainvfx-fluid is our example: an IC-LoRA, a small add-on model for LTX 2.5, which turns flat painted colours into smoke, fire and water. We trained it only on a synthetic dataset that we publish.
  • You can check what made each result. Each export lists the models behind it, with their licenses, in a MODELS.md file.

The models in Paint a plate:

  • FLUX 3 Image Klein (Black Forest Labs) edits the first frame.
  • LTX 2.5 (Lightricks) carries the edit through the shot, with Lightricks' in-outpainting IC-LoRA and WepeNerd's Ripple IC-LoRA.
  • SAM 3.1 (Meta) finds whole objects and follows every edit through the shot.
  • ainvfx-fluid (AInVFX) makes every fluid shot.

Each model keeps its own license, so read each model card before use. For example, the LTX-2.x Community License asks for a paid license from 10 million USD of annual revenue. The code of Paint a plate is Apache 2.0.

💬 Your feedback, and what comes next

Since the release, you sent us many comments, on YouTube and elsewhere: what works, what breaks and what you would like next. We read all of it, and we are grateful for all of it.

The code was frozen during the contest review. The review is over, so we now go back to work on Paint a plate, starting from your feedback. Open source comes first at AInVFX, and Paint a plate continues that work.

Please continue: show us your shots in the comments, or report what breaks in the repository's issues.

🙏 Thank you

  • Comfy, for ComfyUI and for a contest that produced so many open-source projects.
  • Runpod, the contest's partner and the GPU infrastructure sponsor of our Bootcamp.
  • LTX, Black Forest Labs and MiniMax, who presented the contest with Comfy and Runpod.
  • The teams and authors who publish their weights: Lightricks, Black Forest Labs, Meta and WepeNerd. Paint a plate exists because of their work.
  • Every builder who delivered a project, and everyone who tested ours.

💻 Try it

Paint a plate needs ComfyUI v0.43.0 or newer, the ComfyUI-LTXVideo nodes and an NVIDIA GPU, and we recommend 32 GB of VRAM or more. Install it from ComfyUI Extension Manager (search for Paint a plate), by hand, or on Runpod. The repository and our first post give every step, and our 23 test plates are on Hugging Face.

🎓 Learn it, or bring it to your studio

  • Masterclass Part 3, video generation: Monday 30 November 2026. Four hours, live and hands-on. Each part of the series stands alone. See the Masterclass.
  • Bootcamp cohort 3: Friday 22 January to Friday 12 March 2027. 60 hours, live and hands-on, with two instructors. You build your own project, and a jury reviews it twice. See the Bootcamp.
  • Consulting for VFX and animation studios: strategy, model selection and fine-tuning, and ComfyUI workflows that keep artists in control. See our consulting.

Interested in learning more? Our education programs help you build workflows like these. Come build with us!

🔗 Sources & Links

🏆 The contest:

🖌️ Paint a plate:

🔥 ainvfx-fluid:

🧠 Models and tools:

🎓 AInVFX:

🎵 Music:

💬 Community:

📄 Related Posts:

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