Latent Swirl Noise

The name says "noise" but this node is a liar in the best way: it's a spatial deformation, not additive noise. Latent Swirl Noise picks one or more vortex centers, places them in your latent, and rotates nearby pixels around them with a falloff. What you get is a creamy, twisting melt - the "drawn by a distracted barista" look. No static is involved; the pixels themselves get pushed in circles.

This is the perturbation you reach for when you want movement rather than texture: hair blowing into a spiral, water being stirred, fabric twisting, or the classic surreal melting-clock vibe. Because it deforms instead of adding, it composes well with the channel transforms in this pack - a mild swirl plus a channel rotation is a great one-two for "dreamlike but not broken." It's also deterministic per seed, which makes it a nice exploration tool: dial the seed, watch the vortex drift.

The inputs that matter

• vortices (default 1) - how many independent vortex centers spawn per latent. One gives a focused twist; 3–4 gives a storm of conflicting rotations.
• strength (0.75) - peak swirl rotation in radians near the vortex center. 0.75 is a solid visible twist; this maxes at 6.28 (a full 360°).
• radius (0.5) - normalized radius of influence. Higher = the vortex's pull reaches further; lower = a tight, violent core.
• center_spread (0.25) - how far the vortex origin drifts from the latent center. Crank it and the whirlpool stops being center-screen and starts wandering.
• direction_bias - 1 biases counter-clockwise, -1 biases clockwise, 0 is ambivalent. Set it and the whole frame spins the same way.
• channel_mode - global shares one swirl grid across all channels (clean twist), per_channel gives each channel its own grid (glitchy, chromatic-breakup swirls).
• channel_fraction - the fraction of channels that actually get swirled; the subset is picked randomly per sample. Drop it below 1 to swirl only part of the feature space.

Plus seed, mix (0 = original latent, 1 = fully swirled), and an optional mask. Single LATENT output.

Installing and using it

Part of Skoogeer-Noise. Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "Skoogeer-Noise") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ttulttul/Skoogeer-Noise

Restart ComfyUI. No model downloads; deps are torch, numpy, einops, pyyaml - already in ComfyUI.

Common issues

Two things catch people. First: because it's a deformation with no strength-relative-to-std calibration, the effect is resolution-sensitive - a radius that's gentle at 1024×1024 is a tiny violent core at smaller latent sizes, so re-tune radius when you change resolution. Second: with vortices at 1 and the default center_spread, the swirl is dead-center, which reads as a lens-bulge. Most people prefer center_spread ~0.5–0.7 so the vortex lands off-center and feels like motion rather than a filter. If your swirl is coming out as noise-like breakup instead of a smooth twist, you've got channel_mode on per_channel and it's fighting you - switch to global. On Flux.2, wrap with Unpatchify Flux.2 Latent / Patchify Flux.2 Latent as usual.