Projection Mapping Textures

A tool that generates textures and applies them to models with one click.

Year: 2022
Kind: Tools
Made with: Blender, Python, Stable Diffusion

Stylised dagger with a curved blade painted in white, cyan and purple strokes, a gold guard and a carved wooden handle set with a cyan gem, on a grey background.

This tool lets an artist paint a 2D image of an object and easily apply it to an object with one click. It also allows for iteration and addition through Stable Diffusion, allowing artists to iterate on their texturing ideas with just a couple of clicks and a couple of seconds of their time.

Here you can see a knife I textured using this method.

The curved dagger textured through the projection tool, blade pointing up and to the left: painterly white and cyan blade with purple towards the tip, a gold guard and a carved wooden handle with a cyan gem.

You can simply iterate on your ideas by changing colours and shapes and running it through the tool to get different ideas back. Here I changed the hue value on the knife above and the tool spits out a new knife.

A new dagger generated from the hue-shifted input: white blade with gold edging, a red section at the guard and an ornate blue handle with a gold medallion, on a black background.

The tool really shines when applied on simple objects that need several iterations. Here you can see a rock retextured 9 times with minimal input.

Grid of nine grey stylised rocks on black, each with a different generated surface texture and facet pattern.

More outputs from the same pipeline.

Ornate gold and magenta plate chest armour with layered pauldrons, gold bracers and dark sleeves, in a painterly Arcane style on grey. — Magical armour generated in an Arcane style

Dark navy leather chest piece with blue metal pauldrons and bracers, a draped hood collar and a belt with pouches, in a painterly Arcane style on grey. — Assassin's chestplate generated in an Arcane style

Walkthrough of the tool with my thoughts behind it (with audio)