Practical writing on AI 3D generation, printing, game art and the tools around them.
Tutorial
Whether a model prints comes down to the path you picked at the start and four numbers: wall thickness, overhang angle, clearance and scale. Here are the ranges to design against and the checks to run before slicing.
Tutorial
Blender is free and runs on modest hardware, but the first week goes into a shortcut-driven interface rather than pretty models. Here is the interface in five minutes, a first-model walkthrough, the hotkeys worth memorising and how to pick an export format.
Tutorial
ComfyUI can run Hunyuan3D, TRELLIS and the lighter 3D models behind one node graph, but the weights, the VRAM budget and the trip from a voxel grid to a printable mesh are three separate problems.
Tutorial
Four ways to produce an STL: browser primitives, parametric CAD, Blender sculpting and AI image-to-3D. What each route is good at, the export settings that decide printability, and the checks worth running before you slice.
Tutorial
One picture can become a screen-only model, a game character or a printed figure, and each route needs different work. Here is the five-step photo-to-STL pipeline, the print settings a small figure needs, and how to convert an existing AI action-figure image into a real object.
Tutorial
Daz Studio reads OBJ, FBX and Collada, and nothing else you are likely to receive. Here is how to pick a carrier format, land on the right centimetre scale, and repair the three failures people hit: invisible meshes, wrong scale and grey textures.
Tutorial
Hunyuan3D 2.x is a shape diffusion model plus a separate texturing stage, and ComfyUI can drive both. Here is how the graph is wired, what each route costs in VRAM, and what the usual error messages mean.
Tutorial
Silhouette extrusion, lithophane height maps and AI image-to-3D all end in the same file extension and almost nothing else. Here is what each route controls, which photos survive it, and the checks that happen before the first layer.
Tutorial
Unity is Y-up and left-handed, Blender is Z-up and right-handed, and the file in between has to survive both. Two export routes, the import fields worth changing, and a repair table for the first import.
Tutorial
Cry of Fear runs on GoldSrc, so Simon is a compiled .mdl with a fixed skeleton and indexed BMP textures. Here are the two ways to change him, all twelve outfits, and what model packs really replace.
Tutorial
A toggle is any part of a VTuber model that a hotkey can switch on, off or swap while you are live: an accessory, an outfit variant, an eye texture or a facial morph. Here is how the four common kinds work under the hood and how to wire one up without breaking the rig.
Tutorial
Surface Material Override in the editor, runtime swaps from GDScript, and the shared-resource behaviour that repaints every copy of a model — plus the PBR values and import settings that make the result hold up.