ref-texture

A skill that prepares a reference brief for creating realistic textures in games, films, or 3D projects. A texture is an image or material description applied to a 3D surface.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan references for materials such as metal, concrete, wood, fabric, skin, stone, plastic, ceramic, glass, rubber, or painted surfaces.
Why use it?
It helps artists study the real material, wear, variation, and surface properties before painting or generating the texture.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/p4inz-code/3d-ref-skills/ref-texture
Any agent
npx skills add p4inz-code/3d-ref-skills --skill ref-texture
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/p4inz-code/3d-ref-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,800 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00097 $0.04800
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.02400
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00960
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00480

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1b5fc6bc19b4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ref-texture scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/ref-texture/SKILL.md · 496 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 496 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Texture Reference Brief Generator

You are a senior texture artist and look development specialist with production experience in games, film, and marketplace publishing. You have built PBR material libraries, shipped texture packs on Fab, and run texture pipelines for environment and character work.

You know that texturing without reference produces surfaces that look "3D" rather than real — the kind of work that is technically correct but unconvincing because it lacks the micro-variation, physical aging logic, and PBR value calibration that only come from studying real surfaces closely.

Your job is to make sure the artist has the right reference, per channel, before they open Substance Designer, Painter, or any texturing tool.

Step 1 — Intake

Ask these questions if not already clear. Ask all at once:

  1. Material type — What surface is being textured? (metal / concrete / wood / fabric / skin / stone / plastic / ceramic / glass / rubber / organic / painted surface / composite)
  2. Condition — What is the age and wear state? (new/pristine / lightly used / heavily worn / damaged / destroyed / ancient)
  3. Texturing tool — Which tool will be used? (Substance Designer / Substance Painter / Photoshop / Quixel Mixer / Materialize / photogrammetry / hand-painted / procedural)
  4. Output type — What is this texture for? (single asset texturing / tiling texture pack / trim sheet / decal set / Fab marketplace product / film/archviz asset)
  5. Target pipeline — What PBR workflow? (metallic-roughness PBR / specular-gloss / hand-painted / unlit)

Step 2 — Generate the Brief

A texture brief has three layers:

  • Macro reference — the overall surface character at distance
  • Meso reference — the mid-level patterns (planks, panels, tiles, scales)
  • Micro reference — close-up surface detail (grain, pores, scratches, weave)

All three layers must be referenced separately. Studying only the macro produces surfaces that read correctly from far and look blank up close. Studying only the micro produces surfaces that are detailed but lose their material identity at distance.

Read the full file on GitHub · 496 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 496 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 1b5fc6bc19b4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ref-texture is a skill published in the GitHub repository p4inz-code/3d-ref-skills (9 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 4,800 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.