The patch-gg team released trompe on October 25, an open-source tool that textures an entire game level from a gray blockout. The project's GitHub repository, published under the Apache-2.0 license, had about 120 stars within two days.
Texturing a level is one of the slowest steps in turning a gray-box prototype into something that looks like a game. trompe automates that step.
According to the project's README, the pipeline has four stages. trompe first plans camera positions where a player could actually stand, and an image model, accessed through fal, paints each view.
trompe then projects those paintings back onto the level geometry and bakes everything into a single texture.
Every view is painted under overcast lighting, so the result works as albedo: plain surface color with no shadows baked in. The game engine supplies the real lighting.
Planning, projection and baking run on the GPU in a browser, and a headless command-line version is available for pipelines. Input files must be .glb models with UVs, in Y-up orientation.
The README's worked example textures a village blockout with FLUX 3 Klein and Fibo 2 across 128 views. It cost $4.44 and took 26 minutes.
Why it matters: more prototypes are being built by coding agents that handle gameplay and gray boxes well but art poorly. trompe lets developers keep working blockout-first and add a consistent painted look at the end for a few dollars.
Other tools announced in October cover nearby steps: Hi3D refines rough meshes into detailed geometry, and the AnyGameRenderer research paints over gray gameplay footage. Together they point to a pipeline where art is applied to working game geometry rather than built by hand from the start.
Caveat: the cost and time figures are the project's own example and haven't been independently tested.
patch-gg has already followed up: on October 27 the team released anymove, a motion-capture tool for rigged creatures that works from a single AI-generated video.
