A brush that paints material, not colour.
Glaze, clay, liquid metal, foam — textures I kept making by hand in 3D tools.
I am a designer, not a developer.
Hand-made 3D textures were slow and never the same twice. The tool had to feel like drawing, not like setting up a render.
Direct the AI like a studio — and stay the art director of every pixel.
I designed every brush, judged every render and rewrote what did not feel right. One line in, a material with light, shadow and weight out.
Try it
Don’t read about it.
Draw a line.
The real tool, running right here. Pick a brush in the panel, drag on the canvas. Open Brush Lab full screen ↗
Made in the lab
Drawn, mirrored,
replayed.
My own pieces, recorded straight from the editor: a few strokes with radial symmetry on, then the replay exported as video. Nothing was animated by hand.
Fibre + chrome · mirror
Liquid chrome · mirror
Fibre on lilac
One gesture,
a whole object.
- Symmetry: mirror or kaleidoscope
- Replay in the order it was drawn
- Export: GIF · MP4 · PNG 4×
- Camera: follow, zoom, spin, pulse
The editor
A material studio
in a browser tab.
No install, no plug-ins, no render queue. Four things it does that a normal brush cannot.
Random structure
Material picker
Layers panel
Export panel
How it works
One line in,
a material out.
Every brush runs the same four steps. The brushes only differ in what they build on the line and how the light reads it.
01Gesture
Speed, pauses and curvature of the stroke drive its width. Slow down and it swells.
02Geometry
The brush builds on the line: tubes, beads, thorns, leaves, grains or bubbles.
03Height field
Everything is written as heights into a WebGL2 field — strands can layer or fuse.
04Light
A shader turns heights into normals, shadows and a material: glaze, metal, foam, clay.
Raw exports
Straight from the lab,
no retouching.
Reflection
AI did not design it for me. It let me build the tool I was missing — and I stayed the art director of every pixel.
Creative codingWebGLAI skillsInteraction designArt directionGenerative tools
01
Taste is the spec.
The AI writes code fast; knowing when a glaze looks like plastic is still my job.
02
Small steps win.
One brush at a time, tested by hand, before moving on.
03
Tools are design too.
Building my own instrument changed what I dare to make with it.
Brush Lab
Personal project · AI skills · 2025
