Ubisoft Just Gave Away Their AI Texturing Model

The end of the year is close, but the announcements are not slowing down. No new video this week, so here is the roundup of tool and tech changes shaping worldbuilding and creative work.

New tech updates

Ubisoft open-sources CHORD

Ubisoft's R&D team released CHORD, short for Chain of Rendering Decomposition, an open-source model that extracts PBR maps from a single image. Feed it a photo or an AI-generated image and it outputs albedo, normal, roughness, and height maps. Because it is trained on actual rendering decomposition rather than guessing at surface properties, it avoids the plastic, wet-looking sheen that plagues most image-to-material tools. The weights and code are public and already work inside ComfyUI, and they will likely land in Blender add-ons soon. Ubisoft's own team calls the quality promising but not yet AAA-ready.

Gaea 3.0 enters active development

QuadSpinner announced that Gaea 3.0 is in active development, built on a new TOR Engine 3.0 that supports continuous world-space workflows instead of locking you to a single terrain tile. It adds vector drawing tools for placing rivers, roads, and lakes directly, plus 2.7D displacement for overhangs and caves. It is targeting a 2026 release with early access to come.

Substance 3D Designer 15.1 releases

Adobe redesigned Designer's graph creation window with thumbnail previews and categorized templates, so starting a project is less of a guessing game. It also added annotated sample materials for fabrics, wood, metal, plastic, and ceramic to help with learning, and gave the noise system practical updates, including proper non-tiling support and per-node bit depth instead of a locked 16-bit.

Moonlake comes out of stealth

Moonlake introduced Reverie, a game-native diffusion model. Unlike text-to-3D tools that output a static mesh for you to import, Moonlake claims to generate interactive systems with physics, collision, and object permanence built in. The pitch is a programmable world model that holds a consistent world state over time, so you could generate playable spaces rather than assets you assemble. The beta opens in Q1 2026, so there is nothing to test yet.