🎨 Fill / Gradient Generator v2

Most ComfyUI nodes need an input image to do anything. The Fill / Gradient Generator v2 is one of the exceptions: give it a width, a height and some colors and it renders a fill or gradient from nothing. It's part of the Orion4D Layer Manager pack, and it earns its keep in layer work three ways - as a background canvas, as a source of gradient mats for compositing, and as a way to mint a border/frame mask without touching a paint app.

How it works

The generator is a pure pixel pass, no neural anything. It builds normalized coordinates across the canvas, computes a distance or projection per pixel depending on the fill mode, and maps that to a 0–1 gradient position that walks your color stops. The six modes - solid, linear, radial, angular, reflected, diamond - are just different ways of computing that position: angle rotates the linear/angular projection, and center_x/center_y (normalized 0–1, both default 0.5) move the radial/diamond center around. invert flips the position so the gradient runs backwards.

The genuinely useful part is that it outputs masks alongside the image. full_mask is a white rectangle of the whole canvas. border_mask is white only along the canvas edges, sized by inner_border_px (0–200). You can wire those masks straight into other nodes - a border mask is exactly what you want for adding a matte frame to a composite, and a full mask is the "paint everything here" token that keeps a mask-based pipeline flowing. There's also a settings_json STRING output that round-trips the whole configuration, so the state is never lost between the node and its editor app.

The inputs that matter

• width, height - canvas size, up to 8192. Bigger is slower but it's just numpy math, so even 4K renders in a blink.
• fill_mode - the shape of the gradient. solid ignores the stops and just fills with color_1.
• color_count (1–4) plus color_1…color_4 - how many stops, and their hex colors. Only the active count is used.
• invert, angle, center_x/center_y - the geometry knobs above.
• inner_border_px, border_color, border_opacity - an inner border strip drawn inside the canvas edge. Set 0 to skip.

Outputs

image (RGB), full_mask (MASK), border_mask (MASK), and settings_json (STRING). The typical chain: use the gradient as a background layer, feed the border mask into a compositing or blur node to build the frame effect.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack - no models, no extra dependencies, just the NumPy/Pillow/PyTorch a stock ComfyUI already ships:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/orion4d/Orion4D_layer_manager

Restart ComfyUI. Or via ComfyUI Manager → "Install Custom Nodes" → search Orion4D_layer_manager. The pack ships preset gradients in presets_gradients/ (a "Black to White Linear" and "Warm Radial" to start), and the editor app lets you save your own.

Common issues

• Gradient doesn't look like the preview. The editor app is the reference preview, but the Python backend is the final output - hit Run after Apply so the two agree. That's true of every node in this pack.
• center_x/center_y feel inverted or off. They're normalized canvas coordinates (0–1), not pixels - 0.5, 0.5 is dead center. If your radial's heart isn't where you dragged it in the app, it's usually a stale run rather than a wrong value.
• Border mask is white everywhere. inner_border_px defaults to 0, which means no border. Set it to something like 20 and the mask flips on.