Did you ever run into this situation where you just needed a quick PBR texture to finish your scene? A background mosaic, a piece of simple concrete, but it is not ordinary enough to just download from an online library? Well, I have encountered that exact situation too many times to keep counting.
But Ubisoft heard us, the 3D generalists, and delivered an open-source, free alternative pipeline. A few months ago, the game company co-announced with ComfyUI (open-source and locally run AI) the release of a model specifically trained to produce PBR textures. Its name: CHORD.
AI is everywhere these days, and it feels like new services pop up like mushrooms via social media ads. But here is a stark truth and a serious reminder that whatever you currently generate with centralized AI models (Midjourney, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.), the IP does not belong to you. That means "selling" these images to your clients does not make them sole owners, nor are you. In addition, and to a total degree of absurdity, when using those aforementioned centralized cloud services, you are paying to train their future systems with your unique prompts, uploaded references, and design intentions. Meaning you pay to be exploited...
By taking a bit of extra time to run ComfyUI and CHORD (or other models) locally on your own hardware, you get a completely air-gapped system. Here is why that should matter for a professional workflow:
Zero Leakage of Private Assets
If you are concepting fabrics or environmental textures for a client under NDA (non-disclosure agreement), uploading proprietary sketches or mood boards to cloud APIs is a breach waiting to happen. Local generation with ComfyUI or when text-based with OMLX (thank you, Chuck) keeps everything on your own physical drives.Artistic Ownership
Your generation data, failed outputs, and structural guides (like the image prompts you use to guide the tiled patterns) remain purely yours. You aren't leaving a digital trail of your custom workflow on a corporate server. If you add some image influences of your own to it, like drawings or sketches, IP will be guaranteed to be yours.Consistent, Zero-Cost Iteration
Centralized engines rely on subscription credits and pricing changes. Running locally means once the models are downloaded, your custom texture pipeline is genuinely free to use, run, and experiment with forever. No cost aside from some energy to your computer.
Now, let's jump into how this specific workflow for generating seamless images and putting them out as 3D texture sets works.
I compiled three workflows that you can download from the link at the bottom of this article.
The first one is about generating a seamless texture by using only a text prompt. The two nodes marked in purple are the two you will need to install through the node manager. The first one is a conditioning node; the second is a VAE node for the correct decoding of seamless/tileable textures. Prompt engineering here is key; you want to be very clear and precise with your wording, ideally building up the texture with each comma you set.
The second workflow provides slightly more control by allowing you to use both a text and an image prompt to more strongly guide the resulting image. In my case, I wanted to create a checkered mosaic pattern, but everything that came out was an organic arrangement of ceramic tiles. The additional nodes (marked in blue) enabled me to guide placement and ultimately achieve the desired result:
The third workflow is the actual CHORD PBR texture generation workflow. I didn't change anything here, but if your PC is strong enough, you might want to consider attaching a simple upscaling workflow for a higher resolution of the different texture maps:
After you drag and drop the workflows into your ComfyUI user interface, it will prompt you to install additional nodes and models. The last time I had to download and manually put CHORD into my checkpoint folder, the same applied to the nodes. Also, be aware that additional troubleshooting may be needed. But first, let's get you set up.
Three steps are required to get the setup done when running ComfyUI locally:
Make sure ComfyUI is running on its latest version. Usually, when starting the software, it will prompt you with an update message if one is available. It is available for Apple and Windows devices.
Install the CHORD ComfyUI custom node from Ubisoft. You can install them directly from within the node manager. The search term will be "ComfyUI-Chord."
Download the CHORD model and place it in the "checkpoints" model folder.
Load the example flows from the section above; they are all available in this Drive folder. Fair warning: the original Ubisoft workflow performs seamless texture generation and PBR texture generation in one step. I decided to break the workflows apart so they can run individually and will work better on less powerful devices.
If you want to generate seamless textures, I recommend using a decent image-to-image or text-to-image model. For my example, I used Juggernaut XL, but at this point, there are many better ones out there.
Now let's take a look at how these textures perform when being set up in Blender.
I quickly set up sample files in Blender and, using Node Wrangler, added textures to a plane along a path curve to verify the quality. You can download these files from my Google Drive here. I made sure to adjust the height/displacement parameters and switched over to Cycles GPU render.
While I was pretty happy with the results, there is a time and place for this workflow vs. crafting a texture with Substance Designer "by hand." Both have not only a right to exist, but the simple truth is, both must exist. Let me explain why.
This is probably the most important message of this article: Fundamental workflows like designing and iterating textures from scratch with Substance Designer cannot be replaced by AI, not even locally run ones. And this goes way beyond the intellectual property argument.
Software like Substance Designer works extremely differently; they give you layered, parametric, and procedural control over every detail of a texture. You can tweak just one node and instantly generate dozens of controlled iterations of the same material, including colorway explorations. Most importantly, at no additional cost or energy consumption, which is still a mostly ignored problem of centralized AI generation (not so much of running ComfyUI locally, as I do).
In contrast, the double workflow stack at the core of this article enables you to generate "quick fix" textures. They can be used to finish up stuff that isn't in focus, think background of a game environment or a product shoot. They can be used to quickly iterate on an overall idea for creative direction and anything similar. It gets the job done fast, easily, and cheaply. But you can't make surgical changes or iterate just one tiny part of the full pattern. Well, you can, but it would be highly inefficient.
I like to think of these workflows as an intern that can crank out 50 decent concept iterations, and Substance Designer as the senior artist you still call for the cover shot.
Substance gives you ultimate control over each aspect of a texture with ease, and sometimes just with the addition of a "Switch" node. The program also allows creators to crank out several iterations without a sweat and at the highest possible quality. Not to mention, with more PBR outputs and higher resolution.
I figured the comparison could use a quick walkthrough between the ComfyUI setup and the Substance one:
To summarize, I recommend using these workflows in ComfyUI to iterate on creative direction or quickly fix a problem, almost like a Band-Aid. For everything else, such as signature surfaces, branded fabrics, and anything where consistency and art‑directability matter more than speed, I would keep using tools such as Substance Designer. I put together a quick bathroom/Archviz scene in Blender 5.1 to showcase the tile pattern, which is the clear focus of this rendering. It deserves the highest quality as a focal element and therefore Substance, at least for me, is still the way to go!
All files are assembled in this Google Drive folder. It contains the zipped textures I generated, all three JSON workflows (as described above), two Blender sample files, and the bathroom scene.
3D Texture Comparison - ComfyUI vs Substance - Google Drive
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Enjoy and let me know what type of creations you come up with and what you will use them for in the comments!
PS: All files are made available for you to use and experiment with in your personal and commercial projects. But none of those files are made available for direct sales or AI training. Please keep that in mind.
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