XB-BOX - Storyboard Slicer

Storyboard workflows have a boring, repetitive first step: you've got a grid image with four or nine panels and you need them as separate images to feed into image-to-video or start/end-frame generation. XB_StoryboardSlicer automates exactly that. Feed it the grid, pick a layout, and it hands you the individual panels on separate output ports - no cropping by hand, no uneven slices, no count-the-pixels.

It's the kind of node that looks trivial and quietly saves you from the most fiddly part of short-drama / img2vid pipelines. And the pack markets it for exactly that: slicing common 4-grid, 6-grid, and 9-grid storyboard images for image-to-video and short-drama work.

The three inputs

• image - the grid image. The slicer divides it evenly by your chosen mode: if you pick "6-Grid (2x3 Horizontal)" it cuts the width in 3 and the height in 2, giving six equal panels.
• mode - the layout dropdown: 3-grid horizontal or vertical, 4-grid (2x2, the default), 6-grid (2x3 or 3x2), 9-grid (3x3).
• crop_margin - 0 to 0.45, the subtle but important one. Storyboard grids usually have gutters, borders, and white gaps between panels. Set a small margin (like 0.02–0.05, i.e. 2–5% of each panel) and the slicer trims inward from every panel edge, cropping out the gutter and giving you cleaner per-panel crops. Zero leaves the gutters in.

Outputs

Nine IMAGE ports, Img1 through Img9, so the node covers every layout up to a 3×3. Here's the honest catch: unused ports don't stay empty - they get a blank black placeholder image. A 4-grid run still emits Img5–Img9, just as black frames. Wire only the ports you need and ignore the rest, but know that if you batch multiple images through and hook up the "empty" outputs, you'll be handing black frames downstream. It's a quirk, not a bug - the source pads to nine so the node has a stable signature.

Where it fits

The classic wiring: grid image → XB_StoryboardSlicer → each panel feeds an img2vid node (the pack's Wan pipeline nodes love this) or becomes a start/end frame pair. If you're doing short dramas with recurring characters, pair it with the pack's XB_RoleSceneDispatcher, which wants per-scene images and prompts - the slicer is the thing that produces the per-scene images from a single storyboard sheet.

Two small notes. It's a pure image-geometry node - zero model involvement, no VRAM cost, no dependencies beyond the pack itself. And if your grid isn't exactly uniform - say panels of differing size - the equal-slice approach will cut through them; for those, this isn't the right tool. But for clean AI-generated storyboard grids (which are almost always uniform), it's exactly right.

Install: ComfyUI Manager → XB_ToolBox, or git clone https://github.com/wjluoxiao/XB_ToolBox.git into custom_nodes, restart. Found under "XB_ToolBox/Pipeline".