Change a 3D model's texture by chat

You have a model you like, apart from one thing. The cloth should be red, the boots are a smudge, there's a gem where you wanted plain wood. Until now that meant generating the whole model again (and getting a different one back) or an evening of painting the texture by hand.

Now you say what to change, and only the paint changes. The shape, the UVs, the normal map, the rig and the animations come back exactly as they were, so a rigged, animated character is still rigged and animated.

Move your mouse to turn this knight, or drag him on a phone. The one on the right is a single request: "Change all the blue cloth to a deep crimson red. Keep the armour, the gold trim and the leather as they are."

Add a detail

An emblem, a logo, a scar, war paint, a pattern: anything that can be painted onto a surface that's already there. Both of these went onto the same plain tabard, one sentence each:

The crown came from an ordinary chat message: "Put a gold crown emblem on the blue cloth hanging at the front of his waist." The agent rendered the knight first, found the cloth, framed just that piece and painted it. 0.28% of the texture changed. The rest kept its exact pixels.

Fix or remove

The orc's boots came out blurry, so I asked: "Fix the texture on the boots, they look smudgy. Make them crisp worn leather with visible stitching."

It painted both boots from the front, back and sides in one go and left the trousers alone. It also turned the gray shin plates into leather, which is what "crisp worn leather" says, so name what should stay if you want it kept.

Removing works the same way: "Remove every gem from the chest. Where a gem was, continue the surrounding wood planks or gold trim seamlessly."

The whole model at once

For changes that wrap around (the knight's cloth, a pattern all over, a sharper texture everywhere) the agent puts up to 16 views of the model into one image and edits them together, so the front, sides and back match. The crimson knight is one edit with 9 views.

Game assets and render models already got sharper textures on every side last week. This is the next step: you decide what's on them.

What it can't do

• It only paints. Nothing that sticks out of the surface can be added, and a removed gem can still show faintly in the lighting, because the normal map keeps its bump. Look closely at the chest.
• It only changes what its views see. The chest edit used three views, and the fourth side, which none of them saw, still has both its gems.
• Big recolors come out muted. Recolor the model part by part instead of all at once.
• Every edit is drawn fresh. Ask twice and you get two different lions.
• The model needs a texture. Game assets and render models have one, and so do textured GLBs from other tools. Models painted in filament colors for 3D printing, CAD parts and plain STL files don't, so there's nothing to paint into yet.

Each edit costs one generation and takes 20 seconds to two minutes. Looking at the model first is free. Want to check a GLB before you drop it in? Open it in the GLB viewer.