Hard-surface on Blender 5, Meshy 3.0, and Tripo's 8K textures
The essential hard-surface kit caught up to Blender 5, Meshy reorganized its whole app, and Tripo pushed textures to 8K.
A big fortnight for working artists. The essential hard-surface kit caught up to Blender 5, Meshy reorganized its whole app, and Tripo pushed its textures to 8K.
HardOps and BoxCutter reach Blender 5
HardOps 26 and its boolean-cutting companion BoxCutter 26 both shipped running on Blender 5. For anyone who does hard-surface modeling in Blender, this is the update that matters: the workflow most people rely on now lines up with the latest Blender generation.
AI and asset tools
Meshy Workspace 3.0
Meshy restructured its app around tasks rather than tools: Image, 3D, Animate, Scene, and Video. A cleaner mental model for a product that has grown well past simple text-to-mesh.
Tripo adds 8K textures and a ZBrush bridge
Tripo added photoreal textures, smarter part segmentation, and a direct sculpting path into ZBrush, so a generated base mesh can go straight to a sculptor.
PixelLab
PixelLab shipped its larger Pixen text-to-pixel model along with v3 character and animation endpoints, for the 2D and pixel-art crowd.
Gaea 2.3
QuadSpinner's terrain tool added a Macro system for reusable terrain graphs.
Quick hits
Dash released a free standalone Asset Manager for Unreal on FAB. Convai exposed NPC interaction analytics over MCP, queryable from Claude, Cursor, or Codex. Ultra Dynamic Sky v9.5 added a voxel cloud mode and temperature-driven weather VFX.
That is a lot of tooling. Go build something.
Tools
Tools covered in this issue
HardOps
Best for fast hard-surface modeling in Blender.
BoxCutter
Best for fast in-viewport boolean cutting in Blender.
Meshy AI
Best for quickly blocking out scenes or filling them with 3D assets without modeling from scratch.
Tripo AI
Best for fast, game-ready props and concept-to-mesh from a prompt, image, or sketch.
PixelLab
Best for pixel-art games — generate sprites and animations, with an Aseprite extension.
Gaea
Best for AAA-grade terrain and landscapes for your engine.
Dash
Best for fast environment art and set dressing in Unreal.
Convai
Best for adding talking, reactive NPCs to a game without wiring up five AI services.
Ultra Dynamic Sky
Best for instant, controllable skies and weather in Unreal.
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