Re-skinning a 3D Character with AI Image Tools (Without…

TL;DR: I bought a well-made chibi farmer model and wanted to reuse it as a zookeeper character — same mesh, same rig, same animations. Meshy.ai’s Retexture didn’t work for me, and naive cropping of the UV atlas pulled in neighbor pieces. The fix turned out to be embarrassingly simple: connected-component labeling to extract one UV island at a time, send each piece to ChatGPT with a tight prompt, then composite the AI result back with an intersection-of-silhouettes mask. I packaged the workflow as a Claude Code skill — furic/texture-atlas-roundtrip — and ended up with a wildlife keeper that took a couple of evenings instead of a couple of weeks.