how to get AIT working in late 2024 (success)

After a night of endless headscratching I finally managed to get AIT working on comfyUI by downgrading it.

Even though this method allows AITemplate to work, it comes with a few limitations of it's own, such as compatibility conflicts with newer extensions, and missing out in whatever has been implemented into comfyUI since Nov. 2023.

For reference, I did all of this on windows wth a cloned Comfy install.

Installing AIT requirements

First, follow the instructions for installing the reqs as per this repo.
In my case since I am in windows, I had to move the ait_windows bundle to the root of one of my drives because otherwise I'd hit the max path length limit from NTFS:
```
move ait_windows.bundle G:\
cd G:\
git clone --recursive ait_windows.bundle -b fixes
cd ait_windows/python
```

I personally commented out lines 58-60 in setup.py due to a conflict with shutil.

#shutil.copytree("../3rdparty", "./aitemplate/3rdparty")
#shutil.copytree("../static", "./aitemplate/static")
#shutil.copytree("../licenses", "./aitemplate/licenses")

If you commented out the earlier lines, copy and merge the 3 folders manually from ait_windows into ait_windows\python\aitemplate
If you're using the portable install you will have to point the console to the executables manually, which would be in comfyUI\python_embeded\python.exe. Otherwise, use activate.bat in your venv\Scripts
```
python -m pip install wheel
python setup.py bdist_wheel
python -m pip install dist/aitemplate-0.3.dev0-py3-none-any.whl --force-reinstall
```

Installing the node

I personally had no success getting the updated node from this repo to work. I ran into the same problem as #6 even after downgrading Comfy and trying out earlier commits of the nodes.

Clone the fork of the older repo into custom_nodes: https://github.com/asagi4/AIT
Downgrade comfyUI to one of the commits from Nov 12, 2023 (Or alternatively, the last compatible commit from Apr 2, 2024: 6c6a39251fe313c56a88c90d820009073b623dfe):
```
cd comfyUI
git checkout -f 629e4c552cc30a75d2756cbff8095640af3af163
```

Installing modules

In my case I was only interested in generating using SDXL:

Go to https://huggingface.co/Fizzledorf/AITemplateXL/tree/main/modules/windows/sm80/bs1 and grab any unet_xl_XXXX.dll.xz file corresponding to the resolution you want to generate.
Extract it into comfyUI/models/ait/ such that the DLL is directly under the folder.

And that's it. I went from 3.2it/s to 4.7it/s (~60% increase) on my RTX 3090 for reference.

sc_workflow

FizzleDorf / ComfyUI-AIT