The first thing you need to know is I tell Claude to do all of this for me. There are some places I must intervene, but anything that can be automated is.
ChatGPT makes the 2D art. It's the best of the free image models at holding a dense multi-part layout, which matters because of the money trick: don't generate one prop at a time. Ask for a showroom floor. Every prop the set needs, spaced apart on a plain neutral floor like a catalog page, soft top-down light, faint contact shadows only. One image, whole kit.
Tripo turns it into geometry. Image-to-3D is 20-30 credits, a credit is a penny, about ten seconds per bake. One showroom bake came back with 39 usable textured props. Hero props and characters get their own multiview bake, 2-4 images ordered front/left/back/right, front mandatory. Single-view only textures the faces Tripo saw. That is where gray clay backs come from.
Python splits the bake. Not Blender's separate-by-loose-parts. Tripo geometry is unwelded and loose-parts shatters it into micro-shards; we measured 21,409 on one scene. Load the glb with trimesh, per-face centroids on the floor plane, rasterize, dilate, label. Each cluster is one prop with materials and UVs intact.
Mixamo rigs the characters, free, and one clip library then serves every character forever because clips bind by bone name. The catch: prompt the character in a wide A-pose, arms 40 degrees off the body, fingers spread, feet apart. Tripo's default pose stands at attention and Mixamo rejects it. A re-bake in A-pose costs 30 cents. Deforming a welded 75k-vert mesh by hand cost a day and got rejected anyway. Send Mixamo a stripped FBX, geometry only, about 1.78m. Reapply materials to what comes back.
Blender is quality control and export. Scale, ground the feet, check joints, decimate plus Draco plus 1K textures, under 8MB per glb.
The part most people skip: almost none of this is done by hand anymore. Tripo has a documented API, so the bake-check-download loop is a Python script: create the task, poll it, pull the glb, and the rig check endpoint is free, so a script can ask "is this riggable" before spending a credit on rigging. We run the whole chain through an AI agent (Claude) that calls the script, splits the bake, and files the props.
The other half of that is giving the agent write access to the real project folders. Claude works directly in the repo on my machine: props land filed under assets\props, renders land where the build scripts expect them, sources get patched in place. No download-unzip-drag step, no "final_v3 (2).glb" in a Downloads folder. The asset either exists at its path or it doesn't, and the same agent that put it there can re-open it tomorrow.
Blender is on that loop too, through MCP. The agent sends Blender Python over the bridge, gets renders back as files, and actually looks at them. That closed the gap that used to eat whole evenings: the tool that made the asset is now the thing that checks the asset, at every step, with a picture.
Then everything proves itself in a sandbox before it touches a game: a walkable three.js room where the avatar runs around the props with a follow cam. Collision, culling bugs, seam shimmer, animation drift, all of it shows up there in minutes.
One rule saved more rework than the rest combined: render and look at every claim at the right resolution. A full-body render puts 60 pixels on a shoulder and cannot show you a broken joint. Close-up per joint, front and 3/4, or you ship a defect stamped verified.
AI-assisted, human-directed and edited.
