Type a Sentence, Get a Rigged Character: AssetFurnace Runs the Whole Pipeline on Your Own Machine
You've got a game jam in two weeks, and what you actually need is a walk cycle. Not a hero. Not a cinematic. Just a character with a skeleton that moves convincingly enough that nobody notices it's a placeholder. Most image-to-3D tools will hand you a static mesh and wish you luck with the rigging. AssetFurnace (formerly Image to 3D Lab) takes a different approach: it keeps going past the mesh, all the way to an animated GLB you can drop into Godot, Unity, Unreal, Blender, or three.js.
What It Does
AssetFurnace is a local pipeline for turning images into game-ready 3D assets. You type a sentence, drop a picture, or bring your own model, and it generates the image, builds the mesh, cleans it up, fits a skeleton, and animates it. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere, there are no credits to burn through, and you can iterate as many times as you want.
The studio itself is three things: your Library, a single 3D viewer, and a Steps panel. The Create button runs every step for you, but you can stop after any of them if you want to intervene. Runs continue server-side, so closing the tab doesn't kill your generation.
Under the hood, you get your pick of backends — Pixal3D, TRELLIS.2, and Hunyuan3D — all behind one studio interface and one CLI. For rigging, SkinTokens is pure PyTorch, which means it runs on Apple Silicon and NVIDIA and AMD (via ROCm) without needing an NVIDIA-specific build. The output is a GLB with a skeleton and skin weights, plus moves picked from 21 presets: walk, run, jump, dance, kicks, and more. Each preset is fitted to your specific character, so arms stay out of the body and feet stay on the floor.
Why It's Cool
The pipeline doesn't stop at the mesh. Plenty of tools will give you a textured model and call it done. AssetFurnace assumes you actually want to use the thing, which means rigging and animation aren't an afterthought — they're a button press. The auto-rig demo (an anime martial artist with a visible orange skeleton, then the same character dancing) is the pitch in one image.
Pixel Match solves a real, annoying problem. Image-to-3D models redraw your source image, which means text, logos, and faces come back as garbled lookalikes. Pixel Match, part of the Finish step, copies the real pixels from your source image back onto every surface the image can see. That "VANGUARD 07" on a robot's chest stays "VANGUARD 07" even after the mesh is cut to around 5,000 faces. It's on by default for Pixal3D models, with other backends coming.
Low poly without the mush. Related to the above: you can get down to roughly 5k faces and still keep text and faces sharp. For game work, that's the difference between an asset you'd actually ship and one you'd quietly delete.
Prop sheets turn one image into a set. One prompt, nine separate game-ready props with LODs, ready to drop into a scene. If you've ever needed a dozen pieces of environment clutter in an afternoon, this is the feature you'll care about.
Files sized for games, not for demos. The Finish step turns a heavy 30 MB generated model into a light, compressed one. It's a small thing that matters a lot when you're building something that has to actually load.
Licensing is treated as non-negotiable. Every file carries a record of the licences behind it. If you've ever tried to figure out whether a generated asset is safe to ship, you know why this matters. It's not glamorous, but it's the kind of thing that separates a toy from a tool.
It runs locally, on hardware you already own. Apple Silicon gets explicit attention here, which is genuinely uncommon in the 3D and image generation space. AMD users get ROCm support through SkinTokens without needing an NVIDIA-only build. No cloud, no credits, no upload.
How to Try It
The README points to the project site and community channels rather than a full install walkthrough, so start there:
- Head to the repository: github.com/Bingeljell/image-to-3dlab
- Check out assetfurnace.com for the current setup instructions
- Join the Discord if you hit hardware-specific snags — Apple Silicon and AMD setups benefit from community troubleshooting
- Browse Discussions for questions and shared workflows
Once you're in, the flow is: type a sentence or drop an image, hit Create, and stop after any step you want to take over manually. When you reach a humanoid, press Rig, pick a move from the 21 presets, and download the animated GLB.
Final Thoughts
AssetFurnace is aimed at solo developers, game jammers, and anyone prototyping characters who doesn't want to spend an afternoon in Blender before they've even started designing. It's not trying to replace a character artist — it's trying to get you a rigged, moving placeholder in minutes instead of days, on hardware you already own, with the licensing questions already answered. The local-first, licence-tracking approach is the part worth watching, and if the Pixel Match and prop sheet features keep expanding across backends, this becomes a genuinely useful piece of a solo dev's toolkit.
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