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Experience with using AI to generate texture packs?

Thorfinn

By Thorfinn
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Diff Steel Worker

Diff

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I'm not seeing a direct BDcraft similarity, although the vibes are there. Maybe it's something like style transfer? I don't think it looks like fine tuning an existing model. They do seem to be based on existing textures though. While the tiling is not good, it would be way worse if they weren't fed an existing tileable texture as a starting point to then disrupt.

Screenshot2025-08-18at11_18_49AM.thumb.png.e45f843db156549ac162991422a0604c.png

Could also explain the odd "extension" artifacts where the AI tried to (sorta) draw past the bounds of the original texture, causing little "echo" hiccups especially noticeable along the vertical seam in the copper ore.

 

LadyWYT Historian

LadyWYT

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30 minutes ago, Diff said:

I'm not seeing a direct BDcraft similarity, although the vibes are there. Maybe it's something like style transfer?

The ore and stone textures are a dead giveaway. Sphax PureBDCraft has a specific cartoon style that uses a lot of sharp edges, pentagons, and flat colors in its textures. Some of the textures still seem to be vanilla VS(but upscaled), so I'm guessing it's probably a mix of VS textures, Sphax, and possibly textures from elsewhere that have been mixed in as well. 

Which...given that Sphax PureBDCraft has some specific TOS, may or may not present a problem depending on what the user intends to do with the work.

Nabbs1 Berry Picker

Nabbs1

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I absolutely took inspiration from sphax's style and have used same styles in everything.   but the textures are mine pretty sure TOS doesnt say "you cant use penta or hexs as gems or ore heh.      

 

Someone asked a question and I answered .. Then everyone comes in and craps on a project that is still in progress its by no means finished.   

 

Krougal Steel Worker

Krougal

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13 minutes ago, Nabbs1 said:

I absolutely took inspiration from sphax's style and have used same styles in everything.   but the textures are mine pretty sure TOS doesnt say "you cant use penta or hexs as gems or ore heh.      

 

Someone asked a question and I answered .. Then everyone comes in and craps on a project that is still in progress its by no means finished.   

 

Oh, I think we were just having a little bit of fun with you, but face it, people either like Sphax or they don't, there's really no in between with it.

Edited by Krougal
Krougal Steel Worker

Krougal

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1 minute ago, Nabbs1 said:

Possibly,  I chose to be butthurt

It's ok, they make cream for that ;)

Oh, and still a lot of people do like Sphax, so the comparison should be flattering.

 

Edited by Krougal
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Nabbs1 Berry Picker

Nabbs1

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phax inspired,  drawn and washed through an AI to style like warcraft .

 

high quality, warcraft 3 style, hand-painted game texture, stylized fantasy, colorful yet gritty, exaggerated highlights and shadows, painterly brush strokes

Krougal Steel Worker

Krougal

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9 minutes ago, Nabbs1 said:

phax inspired,  drawn and washed through an AI to style like warcraft .

 

high quality, warcraft 3 style, hand-painted game texture, stylized fantasy, colorful yet gritty, exaggerated highlights and shadows, painterly brush strokes

So what are you using for AI?

I'm starting to think I might want to my own trained monkey AI but I'm not sure where to start. I've played with all the corporate ones, but then you hit X minutes and they want $, and frankly, I haven't been impressed enough with any of them to hand over money.

 

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Nabbs1 Berry Picker

Nabbs1

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stable diffusion   its free,   pick a flavor,  get a lora,  train the lora on in this case sphax and warcraft images ..need about 50-500

write a powershell script to pixel perfect upscale or nearest neighbor,  paint and highlight areas in photoshop,  feed through ai changing prompts till its how you like it.   

 

Tiles are difficult but there are utilities but they still leave some seams .. Brick walls and cobblestones are perfect.  .. rocks can be a little off so they need some edits.   Grass is difficult .. abnormal sizes and position data needs to be fixed.

Edited by Nabbs1
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LadyWYT Historian

LadyWYT

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1 hour ago, Nabbs1 said:

I absolutely took inspiration from sphax's style and have used same styles in everything.   but the textures are mine pretty sure TOS doesnt say "you cant use penta or hexs as gems or ore heh. 

Yeah there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other sources, and Sphax doesn't have a sole claim to using pentagons and hexagons as gems, ore, or whatever. But it does appear to be a copy of the style, and the TOS displayed on the Sphax page are pretty clear on what they do and don't allow regarding use of their assets.image.thumb.png.9b3ee3de5142c373e524a2c471a14936.png

Personally, I don't care what you do with your texture project, and I doubt the Sphax team really cares what people do with it for their own personal use. I am, however, pointing out that it could be an issue given how similar the two are, if it were made available as a public download or something. That's all.

Edit: Reading the TOS more closely, it does look like they allow users to port the textures to other games, as long as there isn't an official Sphax release and the port isn't monetized in any way.

Edited by LadyWYT
Koobze Stone Age Settler

Koobze

Posted
Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, Nabbs1 said:

stable diffusion   its free,   pick a flavor,  get a lora,  train the lora on in this case sphax and warcraft images ..need about 50-500

Cool! 

Relevant to this thread's topic, as far as I'm aware the available pre-trained stable diffusion models were trained on the same "open" (stolen) data set as most other ai-gen models, so there can be some concern about attribution. I was recently chatting (with chatgpt :)) about this in specific and if you search for "creative commons" or similar on huggingface you'll find at least some models that are trained on fully open-license material - I was looking to set up common-canvas (CommonCanvas) in specific on my home pc. The output quality isn't as nice but most likely good enough to do some textures/icons which is also what I was thinking to do. Edit: to add, common-canvas is also based on stable diffusion model architecture, but trained from scratch without the iffy maybe-stealing.

ChatGPT - or if you don't like the online-hosted models you can self-host gpt-oss 20B or qwen3 4B or something - can give a python script to set up the model & environment etc too so it seems quite easy to get into. For normal chat-style LLMs (like gpt-oss/qwen) I am using "LM Studio" which is super simple to install and set up, and if you have some decent gaming hardware it should run great - my geforce 3060 handles both of those fine.

Edited by Koobze
clarify common-canvas architecture
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Diff Steel Worker

Diff

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A thick skin is the first thing a professional creative develops. It's understandable to be demoralized when you spend time on something you think is nifty and get differing opinions. (Proper) critique of a work is meant to improve it, give you alternative perspectives and paths for improvement, and isn't any reflection of the person behind the work.

As mentioned earlier upthread, this is just fundamentally something that AI is going to fall short of the level of handcrafted textures. It'll make textures. But you're going to get odd AI artifacts, you're going to get breaks in tiling, you're going to get inconsistent design choices that all mostly match the description but don't match each other (particularly on the cobble, some of the highlights and shadows are exaggerated, but by different amounts, or in different ways). You're also going to run into gaps and strong attractors in the training data, especially with some of the more niche minerals out there. I can see the AI took, I'm assuming, "peridotite" rock and just drew solid peridot gem. These are the pitfalls with the approach, and unfortunately with AI implementing feedback can be challenging.

As someone with 500+ textures of my own for VintageStory sitting in a box in my digital garage, texture packs are just a fr*ck ton of work. When you're dealing with numbers that large, there's no way around it.

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LadyWYT Historian

LadyWYT

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7 hours ago, Diff said:

As someone with 500+ textures of my own for VintageStory sitting in a box in my digital garage, texture packs are just a fr*ck ton of work. When you're dealing with numbers that large, there's no way around it.

I figure the one advantage AI image generation will offer, is allow the project lead to whip up some sample images to demonstrate the general idea of what sort of look they want something to have, and show it to the art team. The art team can easily drum up some concepts from there. Sometimes you might have a picture in your head about how something needs to look, but fail in translating the idea to someone else in wording.

Diff Steel Worker

Diff

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49 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I figure the one advantage AI image generation will offer, is allow the project lead to whip up some sample images to demonstrate the general idea of what sort of look they want something to have, and show it to the art team. The art team can easily drum up some concepts from there. Sometimes you might have a picture in your head about how something needs to look, but fail in translating the idea to someone else in wording.

Oh definitely. That and occasionally brainstorming. One time I needed to draw dirt in an Art Nouveau style, nothing I was splatting down looked any good at all, and there were no references to be found. Feeding that prompt into an AI... actually only gave me brown soup, but I did fish some ideas out of it that got me unstuck.

I've been labeled as a luddite who will be left behind in the supposedly inevitable AI revolution, but AI has utility. It just also has big limitations and severe legal and ethical concerns that techbros love shoveling under the rug so they can move fast before they break everything. The hype train is vastly outrunning the actual tech and smashing obliviously through the all problems with it because that's easier than acknowledging them.

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