With the explosion of AI image generators in the past few weeks, I’ve been enamored with them like everyone else. When the initial shock wore off, I started trying to think of the most immediately useful thing I could create using them.

I’ve worked with a lot of CAD automation in varying forms and realized I could use the OpenAI image generation API to create image textures. One cool application for this would be fully automating the creation of a textured phone case from prompt to .STL file. The key components of the workflow I settled on are:

1. A scripting tool (Python)
2. Image textures (received from OpenAI)
3. A script-able 3D modeling program capable of applying image textures (nTopology in this case, but I’ll probably switch to Blender)

An example grayscale image texture and corresponding 3D texture application

I already had some scripts for a similar image texture workflow, so automating this with the OpenAI API was quite quick and can be seen below.

I could see this becoming a part of online customization tools — whether it’s for 3D printed objects or even things like T-shirt designs. Super excited to play with these tools some more!