Texture Cell Pattern

Scales, cracked mud, reptile skin, shingled roofs, armor plates - a huge slice of nature and tech is just "cells." Making convincing cells used to mean building a voronoi in a texture tool or downloading a tileable pack and hoping it didn't repeat visibly. x1TextureCellPattern generates a cell pattern procedurally in any resolution, tileable by construction, with enough control to go from clean hexagons to wobbly lizard scales. It takes no image input - one settings blob in, a texture out.

How it works

It's a procedural cell field: seeds are scattered across the canvas, and each pixel belongs to its nearest seed, forming the classic voronoi cell walls. cell_scale_px (96px) sets the cell size, and jitter (0.85) is the whole personality of the node - it's how much the seeds are scattered from a perfect grid. Low jitter gives you regular, honeycomb-ish cells (good for sci-fi paneling or tiles); high jitter gives the irregular, organic cell boundaries you want for scales and cracked mud.

pattern_mode extends it beyond plain cells. The valid modes are fill (solid cells), edge (just the cell walls as lines), cracks (wall-based crack lines), distance (distance-to-seed as a gradient, which reads as a soft bumpy field), and bevel (cells with a beveled edge - the armor-plate look). edge_width (0.18) sets how thick the walls are, softness (0.0) blurs them, and contrast/balance shape the response. seed rerolls the whole arrangement for variation.

The inputs that matter

Everything lives in a settings_json string, prefilled:

• width / height (1024) - output resolution.
• pattern_mode - fill, edge, cracks, distance, or bevel.
• cell_scale_px (96) - how big the cells are.
• jitter (0.85) - grid-vs-organic. The character knob.
• edge_width (0.18) - wall thickness.
• seed (31) - reroll the cell layout.
• invert - flip the pattern.

Outputs are image, mask, and cell_pattern_info (mode, scale, seed).

Installing it

Part of the MKRShift Nodes pack. ComfyUI Manager: search "MKRShift", install, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/criskb/MKRShift_Nodes

Restart after. No models - instant procedural math.

Gotchas

For organic materials, resist the urge to drop jitter all the way down - perfect cells are the fastest way to a "generated texture" read. And the mask output matters more than you'd think: it's the same pattern as a MASK, which means you can wire it into a bump or roughness map and get the cell relief without ever generating a separate height field. The node's edge mode is genuinely good as a tileable line-art overlay too. Just remember the same settings_json rule as every MKRShift node: broken JSON silently resets to defaults, so reroll a boring result with seed, not by breaking the string.