With the explosion of AI image generators in the past few weeks, I’ve become 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 DALL·E 2 by OpenAI 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 DALLE API was quite quick and can be seen below (May or may not have used ChatGPT to remind me how to use requests in Python).

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!