Batch Variation Generator

If you've ever wanted to see the same subject at every time of day without hand-editing a prompt ten times, this is the node. Batch Variation Generator takes one base prompt and fans it out into up to ten lighting variations - sunrise through wet night - as list outputs you can run in parallel. It's the pack's answer to A/B testing prompts, and it's the fastest way to learn what a modifier actually does to your images.

Mechanically it's straightforward. You pick a category and the node resolves that into a set of modifier IDs, then calls the orchestrator's batch generator to append each lighting description to your base prompt. all means IDs 1–20, dry means only the clear-condition modifiers (1–16 for lighting), wet means the low-light/reflection ones (17–20), and custom reads your custom_ids field - a comma-separated string like "1,7,11,18" - so you can build your own day/night cycle: sunrise, golden hour, night, wet blue hour.

The inputs that matter: text (base prompt), category (all/dry/wet/custom), and custom_ids (only used in custom mode). Outputs are ten STRING list outputs named var_1 through var_10, each a single-item list, so you can feed them to ten separate KSampler branches in parallel.

Here's the gotcha you need to know before you build that parallel graph: the node always emits all ten outputs, and if your selection produces fewer than ten variations it pads the rest with the original unmodified prompt. So wet gives you 4 real variations and 6 copies of your base text. If you only wire up the first four outputs you're fine, but hooking up all ten silently gives you duplicate renders of the base prompt. That's not a bug in the code - it's the fixed-output-count compromise - but it's easy to burn GPU time on unless you expect it.

Installing is the pack's standard zero-dependency story: ComfyUI Manager → search "Variationator" → install → restart, or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/MushroomFleet/ComfyUI-Variationator.git. No models to download, no requirements.txt to install despite an install-portable.bat that references one. Look under Prompt Orchestration.

Where this node earns its keep: time-of-day studies for architecture or product shots, and batch tests of a new checkpoint to see how it handles lighting vocabulary. Where it's a trap: it's lighting-only. Despite the generic name, there's no category for mood or weather here - the batch generator is wired to the lighting dimension specifically. And remember the pack's own advice: mixing DRY and WET categories gives you contrast in a comparison set, which is exactly what you want when the goal is "do these variations actually look different?" If they don't, the fix is usually the checkpoint's lighting vocabulary, not the node.