Upload a portrait — or spin up the Mutation Lab — and export a customizable, poseable .glb with PBR materials and an organized mesh hierarchy. Blocky, organic, or a full-on creature. GLB_FACTORY is a browser-based procedural avatar studio built from primitive 3D shapes (cylinders, boxes, spheres) in the spirit of Minecraft/Roblox-style voxel characters — no Blender, no manual UV unwrapping, no waiting for a bake.
Two connected modes
- Create From Photo — Upload portrait → build avatar → customize → export GLB
- Mutation Lab — Generate specimens → collect rare mutations → breed two parents → export offspring
Export honesty: Viewport walk/dance/pose controls animate mesh groups in the browser. The GLB exporter currently ships an empty animation list. Treat downloads as poseable hierarchies with materials — not Mixamo-ready skinned AnimationClip characters — until full bones + clips land.
 🐊 Alligator animated chomping jaw |
 👹 Monster warts & fangs |
 🤡 Evil Clown because someone asked |
 🦁🐟 Lionfish venomous spike rays |
- AI-Powered Mode — When a backend is available (local dev, or a self-hosted deployment with your own
GEMINI_API_KEY), the app calls the Gemini API to locate the face and extract skin/hair/clothing colors automatically. This is not active on the live GitHub Pages demo above — GitHub Pages serves static files only, there's no backend to call. - Static Fallback Mode (what the live demo actually runs) — An HTML5 canvas sampler reads the portrait pixel data directly in-browser and estimates the same colors client-side. Zero network requests, zero API key required.
| Category | Options |
|---|---|
| Base mesh style | Organic Humanoid, Rounded Cube (voxel), Classic Box (retro blocky) |
| Creature mesh styles | 🧌 Gremlin, 👹 Monster, 🐊 Alligator, 🦝 Raccoon, 🐱 Cat, 🐶 Dog, 🦎 Lizard, 🐀 Possum, 🐠 Tiger Fish, 🦁🐟 Lionfish, 🤡 Evil Clown — each with its own head geometry (jaws, masks, fins, spikes, floppy ears — not just a recolor) |
| Individual creature parts | Fins 🐟, Tail 🦎, Snout 🐽, Whiskers 🐱, Mushroom Cap 🍄 (mix onto any base mesh style) |
| Gear | Blaster 🔫, Knife 🗡️, Herb Pouch 🌿, plus Glasses, Wings, Horns, Crown, Halo, Cyber Visor, Cape |
| Poses (in-viewer) | Idle, Walk, Dance, Zombie, Spin, Ninja, or joint sliders — live mesh-group posing in the studio (not exported as AnimationClips yet) |
| Snap Studio | 3D particle lenses, big-head lens, VHS/Cyber/Sepia/Glitch color filters, custom caption overlay |
| Mutation Lab | One click generates a new proportional/palette variant, ranked from COMMON up to the elusive CHAOTIC-DIVINE |
More species (turtle, snake) and a moving-tentacle octopus variant are actively in progress.
An automated GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/deploy.yml) builds and publishes the app on every push to main.
To activate it on a fork: Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: GitHub Actions. Progress shows under the Actions tab.
Prerequisites: Node.js 18+, npm
npm install
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000.
Optional, to enable Gemini-powered face detection locally instead of the client-side fallback — create .env.local:
GEMINI_API_KEY=your_gemini_api_key_here- Three.js — WebGL rendering & procedural mesh construction
- React 19 + Vite 6 — SPA runtime & build
- Tailwind CSS v4 — utility-first styling
- Lucide React — icons
- Express + Google GenAI SDK — optional backend proxy for Gemini orchestration (self-hosted only, not used by the GitHub Pages demo)
- One-Click Procedural Chaos Mutation Lab 🌀 — Tap Mutate Skeletal DNA Now for instant palette/proportion variants instead of manually rescaling hierarchies and repainting textures by hand. Tune the Chaos Regulator, or let the Chrono-Loop auto-cycle generations. Genomic rank flashes from
COMMONtoCHAOTIC-DIVINE. - Live Client-Side Texture Blending 🎨 — Drag a photo in; color harvesting and feather-edge facial blending onto the head texture happen live in-browser. (The UV coordinates themselves are a fixed projection computed at mesh-build time — what's live is the texture painted onto them, not the mapping itself.)
- Rig QA Drop & Squish Test 🦘 — One click runs a stretch-and-squash stress check on the live rig, with 8-bit sound design.
- Instant 2D Style Overlays 👾 — Retro CRT, Cyberpunk HUD, Blueprint, Pencil Sketch, or Gameboy dither, toggled live.
- Direct Bone Joint Controllers 🦴 — Slide Head Yaw/Pitch, arm rotation, or leg kicks directly.
- Web Audio Soundboard 🔊 — Real oscillator-driven 8-bit sound on rig actions, shutter clicks, and meltdowns.
Built by DaCameraGirl — bug reports and creature requests welcome.