Lets be honest. To an AI Tool newcomer, ComfyUI is a ridiculously complicated pile of spaghetti and boxes, with confusing terms like “nodes”, and “loaders” and a loooong list of potential tools that make the eyes bleed to scroll through.
So I’m not bothering with all that nonsense (At least at first), and neither should you.
Lets be clear. The current state of AI tools and art make it stupidly easy to “cheat” at whatever task you are trying to accomplish, whether that be writing code, making art, or writing an Article about AI Tools (ahem). Admittedly, that was the first thing I tried when attempting to fulfil this task for the Christmas Walkthrough event. But after reading the overly complicated instructions on how to “get started with ComfyUI” that ChatGPT spat out, I realized what it is I really wanted to say and decided to toss that out and write this myself.
As a relative newcomer to AI Art, I’ve relied heavily on “borrowing” prompts, lora and parameters from other more advanced/successful users, especially when starting off to generate images that I wanted to create. I felt a bit guilty for "pirating" other peoples prompts, but over time I began to read deeper into those tools I was “borrowing” and I started to get a real idea of how the underlying models were trained and how to actually get the most out of them.
It took a couple months of messing around with image generation (read: making cute images of Pokémon and fox girls, and other stuff that should never see the light of day) before I began to seriously study and experiment with those tools to figure out what really made them work. I had a lot of fun doing that, and that is what I think really helped me build my confidence to go deeper.
That same methodology applies to AI Tools generated with ComfyFlow.
So here is how to get started with that on TensorArt, beginning with some good old fashioned piracy borrowing! (Arrrr)
Find an existing AI Tool that does what you want (or close to it)
Navigate to the profile page of the user who created that tool
Check their Workflows page, to see if they published the workflow
If not, then start over and find the next best Tool that does what you want
If the workflow is available, Run it and save a copy under your Workflow
Start Experimenting!
Make small tweaks to begin with
Apply what you already know from online image generation
Don’t be scared to break things and start over
If the tool you chose ends up being too complicated to wrap your head around right now, start over from step 1 to find a simpler tool, one with fewer Nodes.
Keep going til you start to get the hang of how it actually works!
Publish your first workflow as soon as you feel you’ve begun to understand the basics. It doesn’t have to be something too distinct from the original tool you began with, just enough to show you took some risks and tried something a little different than the original. This is your version 1, which you will use to try making your first AI Tool.
Go back into your published workflow and follow the recently updated AI Tool guide. It’s really straightforward and simple to do. I recommend sticking to just converting your text prompt to an AI input and publishing after testing. Make sure you enable pop-ups if clicking on the Publish button doesn’t do anything (I learned that the hard way, too!).
Good luck!
