⚡ Illustrious Workflow as of version 18

🛠️ Purpose & Design Philosophy

This workflow is a high-fidelity environment built for Illustrious XL. It prioritizes stability and professional texture over generation speed. It follows an "all-in-one" philosophy: configure your prompts, hit queue, and let the workflow handle the multi-stage refinement from start to finish.

Not for Speed: This is a heavy-duty refinement tool. If you want 2-second previews, use a basic SDXL workflow.
Personal Use: Built for my specific production needs. It is shared as-is for those who want a "set-and-forget" pipeline for Illustrious.
All-in-One Logic: The workflow handles generation, detailing, and upscaling in one continuous pass.

🚀 Key Features & 2026 Logic

Global Model Patching (RescaleCFG): Includes a pre-configured RescaleCFG patch (Multiplier: 0.7) applied globally. This acts as "HDR Insurance," preventing the "deep-fried" or over-saturated look common in high-CFG Illustrious runs.
Detail Daemon Sampler: Integrated to enhance structural depth. In this version, it is tuned to start at 0.4 to preserve the core Illustrious character proportions while sharpening hair and eye details.
Hybrid Upscale Strategy: * Group Bypass Switch: Easily toggle between a Pixel-only (Lanczos) path for flat anime styles and an Upscale-Model path for 2.5D/highly detailed renders.
- Ultimate SD Upscale: Re-draws the upscaled canvas at a 0.35 denoise to lock in fine textures.
Power LoRA Loader: Manage multiple Illustrious-specific LoRAs without messy wiring.
Triple Detailer Groups: 3-stage targeted refinement for faces, hands, and clothing using standard detection models.
CivitAI Meta-Sync: Images are saved with full metadata (Model, LoRAs, Sampler info) for automatic site parsing.

⚠️ Disclaimer & Compatibility

Install at Your Own Risk: Custom nodes can break your environment. I am not responsible for troubleshooting your specific installation.
ComfyUI Portable: Built and tested on the Portable version. Desktop app users may face additional hurdles.
The "Your Version" Factor: Your node versions and environment are 99.9% likely to differ from mine.
Nodes 2.0: I do not recommend using Nodes 2.0. It creates unpredictable UI behavior; I will not provide support for issues involving this feature.

🤝 Support & Boundaries

No DMs: DMs are disabled due to repeat spam. Please check the Discussions tab below; most questions have already been answered.
Modifications: You are free to hack this workflow apart. However, you are responsible for fixing it if it breaks.
Custom Requests: I do not make private workflows. If you need a custom solution, post a Bounty on CivitAI. There are many talented creators ready to help you for a fee.

Description

v7b workflow built and tested on:

ComfyUI 0.3.29

ComfyUI frontend v1.16.8

Python version: 3.12.8 (tags/v3.12.8:2dc476b, Dec 3 2024, 19:30:04) [MSC v.1942 64 bit (AMD64)]

Pytorch version: 2.6.0+cu126

Disclaimer: If you are using a different version than of any/all of those listed above, then this workflow may not work for you. I can't account for every difference, since we are all potentially using different versions of something.

v7b changes:

Workflow assembled from scratch.

No copy/paste or holding alt and clicking to copy nodes.

Perturbed Attention Guidance is bypassed by default. You can enable it by clicking on it and either press ctrl-B on your keyboard or click on the bypass icon.

Bypassing it does save time on generation speed.
Turning it on adds about 10 to 15 seconds on a 832 x 1216 image on a single KSampler on a RTX3060 12GB.
In terms of the entire workflow, you would be adding an estimated 5 to 8 seconds on the 2nd KSampler, each tile on USDU since they are set to 10 steps by default, and for each detected face/eyes/etc on the Detailer nodes.
PAG can help make the image look better, but is the extra time worth it to you for a possibility?

CFG++Sampler Select is toggled on by default. You can toggle it off by using the Boolean Switch directly above the node. Toggling it off will switch over to using the Sampler Selector (Image Saver) node.

Please ensure you adjust any other parameters as needed, such as CFG, Steps, etc.

There are a couple nodes above the Positive Prompt for token count. The node that shows the count is kind of buggy resulting in showing two lines of token counts when running more than one generation. If you don’t want to worry about this, you can just delete the two nodes and it will not affect the workflow.

I dropped all the little notes from the workflow. After rebuilding the workflow from scratch, they are the only thing not added compared to the old workflow.