StableGen 0.4.0: Blender add-on turns text into rigged, textured 3D characters

What this is about

StableGen is a free, open-source add-on for the 3D software Blender. It generates, textures and rigs 3D objects using AI models that run locally. Developer Ondřej Sakala has released version 0.4.0. The project began as a bachelor's thesis at the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) and is licensed under the GPL-3.0. In the demo video, a single prompt produces a textured, animatable character, and later an entire village in Unreal Engine 5.7.

How it works

StableGen runs inside Blender and sends the compute-heavy work to a ComfyUI server. ComfyUI is an interface for running image AI models; the server can run on the same machine or elsewhere on your network. Results come back into the scene as materials, meshes and skeletons.

Texturing works by projection. You place cameras around the object or scene. For each camera, the add-on generates an image that fits the geometry, guided by a depth map (depth guide). These views are then projected onto the surface and blended depending on viewing angle. Each view is generated with the previous ones as context, so the texture stays consistent all the way around.

What's new in 0.4.0

• From prompt to finished asset: You describe a character and pick a candidate image from a preview gallery. TRELLIS.2 builds the mesh from it, SkinTokens rigs it, and views generated from all sides become the texture. You can also start from an image, skip the rig, or use the texture TRELLIS.2 generates itself.
• Masked Edit (new): You paint over an area and describe the change. Only that area is regenerated across all cameras, and everything else stays as it was. As an example, the project shows a courier jacket being swapped for a series of other jackets.
• Auto-rigging (new): SkinTokens generates the skeleton and skin weights, meaning the assignment of how strongly each bone moves the surface. Animations from FBX or BVH files, for example from Mixamo, can be retargeted onto the rig.
• PBR materials: Marigold estimates albedo (base color), roughness, metallic and normal maps from the views. These are projected and baked into standard maps.
• Experimental: Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo, MOSS Image and FIBO 2.0 Edit, plus a reworked projection with cleaner seams, a new panel and a complete user manual.

Export and manual control

Results can be baked into UV textures along with PBR maps. You can export as glTF (for Godot and the web) or FBX (for Unreal Engine and Unity). There are also orbit GIFs and MP4s, multicolor 3MF files for 3D printing, and a scene queue for unattended batch processing. Every step can also be done by hand: reorder cameras, give individual views their own prompts, change the blending and reproject without regenerating.

In the demo, Qwen Image 2.1 ran with 10 cameras on an RTX 4080 with 16 GB. The village in Unreal Engine 5.7 consists of houses, props, trees and ground as GLB files with PBR maps, plus five rigged characters as FBX files with a walk animation (Mixamo).

What you need to try it

• Software: Blender 4.2 to 4.5, or 5.1 and newer (5.0 is not supported), plus a working ComfyUI install.
• GPU: NVIDIA preferred; about 8 GB VRAM for SDXL, 16 GB or more for Qwen Image.
• System: Windows, Linux, or macOS on Apple Silicon.
• Disk space: 10 GB to over 50 GB for models, depending on your selection.
• Installation: Install ComfyUI, then run python installer.py <ComfyUI-path> (package 3 SDXL, 13 Qwen Image 2.1, 8 mesh generation, 14 auto-rigging). Then install the add-on ZIP from the releases in Blender, set the Output Directory and server address (default 127.0.0.1:8188), and allow online access.

Licenses

StableGen itself is GPL-3.0, but the models have their own licenses. Qwen Image 2.1 and 2.1 Turbo are under the Qwen Research License, and Bria FIBO 2.0 is under CC BY-NC 4.0; commercial use requires an agreement with Bria. MOSS Image is Apache-2.0. TRELLIS.2's Native texture mode uses NVIDIA's nvdiffrast and nvdiffrec. Qwen Image Edit and SDXL are not affected.

Our take

StableGen bundles several separate tools (mesh generation, texturing, PBR, rigging, export) into one Blender interface and makes them usable locally. That's attractive for indie developers, hobbyist artists and prototyping. What remains unclear is the quality beyond the examples shown: the demos come from the developer, and the video includes time-lapse segments. Commercial use is limited by the non-commercial model licenses. SDXL or MOSS Image can help there, but check each license yourself.