Micro Detail Overlay

AI texture extraction is great at broad surface color and total garbage at fine grain. The roughness you get back is often a smoothed approximation, and the albedo reads like plastic because the micro-noise that made the original feel real got averaged away. Micro Detail Overlay exists to put that back: it takes a base map and a detail map and blends the detail's high-frequency variation onto the base, so a wall gets its stucco texture, a fabric gets its weave, a metal gets its brush marks. The name says it all - this is the "make it stop looking like AI" node.

It lives in TextureAlchemy's Texture Alchemist/Detail category, alongside the pack's Detail Map Blender, and it's aimed at exactly the "washed out / plastic" complaint that the KB's PBR-adjacent discussions keep coming back to.

How it works

You feed a base and a detail image. The scale slider (0.1–10) controls how the detail map tiles - treat it as the detail's frequency. At 1.0 the detail is sampled at native resolution; crank it up and the pattern repeats smaller and denser, which is how you get fine grain from a coarse texture. Then the detail is blended onto the base using one of four modes:

• overlay - the default, and the most material-friendly. Contrast-oriented, keeps midtones.
• linear_light - the aggressive one; strong contrast, good when the detail needs to actually read.
• soft_light - gentle, for barely-there surface texture.
• add - raw additive, which brightens as it adds detail. Use when you know what you're doing.

intensity (0–2) scales the whole effect, and the optional mask input lets you confine the detail to a region - detail on the wall, not on the door. The output is result, the blended base.

The inputs that matter

• base - what you're enhancing.
• detail - where the micro-variation comes from. A noise or procedural map works; so does a different texture.
• scale - the real control. Dial it to match the surface frequency you're after.
• mode - overlay for almost everything, linear_light when you need the detail to actually show.

Where it fits

Two classic setups. First, roughness work: take a base roughness, overlay a noise detail, and you get believable surface variation instead of a flat gray value - this is the single biggest "wow, that reads as real now" move in material work. Second, albedo detail: a masked overlay adds fabric weave or skin grain without touching the base color's balance. The pack's own docs also suggest chaining it - base → Micro Detail Overlay (×2 or ×3) → progressively finer detail layers.

Installing it

Part of ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy. ComfyUI Manager → search "TextureAlchemy" → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/amtarr/ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy

Restart, find it under Texture Alchemist → Detail. No pip packages or model downloads - pure blend math.

Common issues

• "The detail looks tiled or repeating." That's scale doing its job - lower it to make the pattern larger/sparser, or use a proper seamless detail map.
• "Everything got brighter." You're on add mode. Switch to overlay or soft_light, which preserve midtone brightness.
• "The mask cut off mid-detail." The mask is applied as-is, no feathering - blur the mask if you want soft transitions.
• "The detail is invisible." Either intensity is near 0 or the detail map is too low-contrast to survive the blend. Raise intensity, or switch to linear_light.

It's a small, opinionated node, but for the "my texture came out plastic" problem it's the fastest fix in the pack. Just remember the detail is only as good as the detail map you feed it.