TEXTURA — A Free Parametric Texture Generator, Now a Figma Plugin

TEXTURA is a free, browser-based parametric texture generator: eight pattern systems — halftones, ridgelines, worm chains, reaction-diffusion labyrinths — deformed by a stack of field effectors. As of this week it is also a Figma plugin that generates the same textures as native, editable vector shapes inside your file.

This is the release note, and the story of how a type tool turned into a pattern lab.

From Letters To Fields

TEXTURA started as a question left over from AlgoType. That tool rasterizes text into a coverage grid and rebuilds it from modules — and somewhere in the middle of building it I noticed the letters were optional. The interesting machine was underneath: a grid of values, and rules that turn values into marks.

Remove the text, and the coverage grid becomes a field — any field. Noise, gradients, radial falloffs, a chemical simulation. The modules become pattern systems. That reframe is the whole tool.

For the visual direction I kept returning to the early work of Studio Feixen — the posters where a few systematic marks, repeated with discipline and pushed by some invisible rule, read as both graphic design and generative art. I collected parametric-texture references for a while, then stopped collecting and started building the parts none of the references had: a stack of composable field effectors, and a reaction-diffusion field you can watch grow.

What It Actually Does

Every texture is three decisions stacked:

1. A pattern system draws marks on a grid — halftone dots, ridge lines, glitch bars, cells, worm chains, packed circles, a marching-squares contour, or corridors carved from a reaction-diffusion simulation.
2. A field decides how much each cell gets — flat coverage, or the live Gray-Scott simulation.
3. Effectors warp everything — noise, curl, radial, bands, spots and shear fields targeting size, displacement, density, rotation or dropout. Up to six, stacked, each with its own falloff mask.

The reaction-diffusion field deserves its own sentence: it is a real Gray-Scott simulation seeded deterministically, so the same seed always regrows the same labyrinth — reproducibility survives the chemistry.

Everything exports: print-resolution PNG, true-vector SVG, seamless tile PNGs, height and normal maps for 3D materials, and MP4 loops when the pattern moves.

How Do You Make A Seamless Repeating Pattern In Figma?

Install TEXTURA from Figma Community, turn on SEAMLESS TILE, shape the pattern in the live preview and press Generate. Tiling is mathematical, not cosmetic: every noise field wraps on a torus and elements crossing a tile edge are duplicated on the opposite side, so the repeat is exact in both directions — no mirror tricks, no visible seam.

In the web tool the same toggle feeds the tile exports; in Figma the tile arrives as a frame of vectors you can drop into a fill, a component, or a grid of instances.

Why A Figma Plugin

The web version was finished, and I kept catching myself exporting an SVG, opening Figma, pasting, ungrouping, recoloring. Every texture made the same round trip. The obvious fix was to delete the trip.

So I ported the engine — with Claude (Fable 5) as the pair — into a Figma plugin. The rendering core is the same code that draws the web canvas; the difference is where the marks land. In Figma they land as native nodes: real ellipses, rectangles and vector paths with ordinary fills, grouped in a named frame. Not a flattened bitmap, not one merged path — shapes you can recolor, thin out, or restyle element by element.

Three details make it feel native rather than ported:

• It respects your selection. Select a frame and the texture generates into it at its exact size; select nothing and it lands at your viewport, sized sensibly.
• Every output is re-editable. The plugin writes its settings into the frame it generates. Select any TEXTURA frame later — days later — load its exact state back, tweak one slider, regenerate in place.
• It counts before it draws. Dense settings can mean tens of thousands of nodes; the plugin shows the element count live and warns before generating something that would make your file crawl.

Presets carry across both versions — save a look in the browser, import the JSON in Figma, or the other way around.

Where To Get It

• Web, free, no signup: 0r8it.com/lab/textura
• Figma plugin, free: figma.com/community/plugin/1663525865725570838/textura

Everything you export is yours — free for personal and commercial work, no attribution required. A link back is appreciated, and I genuinely want to see what you make with it.

Lab Notes, Part 3 Of 3

This closes the loop the lab opened: AlgoType turned a book about type systems into an instrument, its motion pushed me into 3D with TYPE IN SPACE (its own write-up is next), and TEXTURA took the machinery under both and pointed it at pure pattern — first in the browser, now inside Figma.

One idea the whole way down: design the process, and let the artefact fall out of it.