# UV-free Texture Generation with Denoising and Geodesic Heat Diffusions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16762 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16762/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07600/) (2022)
- [GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11163/) (2022)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [Understanding Diffusion Models: A Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11970/) (2022)
- [TEXTure: Text-Guided Texturing of 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01721/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Mesh: Generating textured meshes from text using pretrained image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13333/) (2022)
- [Text2Tex: Text-driven Texture Synthesis via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11396/) (2023)
- [Texture Fields: Learning Texture Representations in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07259/) (2019)
- [DiffusionNet: Discretization Agnostic Learning on Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00888/) (2020)
- [Paint3D: Paint Anything 3D with Lighting-Less Texture Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13913/) (2023)
- [TexFusion: Synthesizing 3D Textures with Text-Guided Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13772/) (2023)
- [Texturify: Generating Textures on 3D Shape Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02411/) (2022)
- [Texture Generation on 3D Meshes with Point-UV Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10490/) (2023)
- [On the Design Fundamentals of Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04542/) (2023)
- [3DStyleNet: Creating 3D Shapes with Geometric and Texture Style Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12958/) (2021)
- [AUV-Net: Learning Aligned UV Maps for Texture Transfer and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03105/) (2022)
- [SPSG: Self-Supervised Photometric Scene Generation from RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14660/) (2020)
- [Sin3DM: Learning a Diffusion Model from a Single 3D Textured Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15399/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Fractional Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01795/) (2025)
- [PacTure: Efficient PBR Texture Generation on Packed Views with Visual Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22394/) (2025)
- [DoubleDiffusion: Combining Heat Diffusion with Denoising Diffusion for Texture Generation on 3D Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03397/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Seams, distortions, wasted UV space, vertex-duplication, and varying resolution over the surface are the most prominent issues of the standard UV-based texturing of meshes. These issues are particularly acute when automatic UV-unwrapping techniques are used. For this reason, instead of generating textures in automatically generated UV-planes like most state-of-the-art methods, we propose to represent textures as coloured point-clouds whose colours are generated by a denoising diffusion probabilistic model constrained to operate on the surface of 3D objects. Our sampling and resolution agnostic generative model heavily relies on heat diffusion over the surface of the meshes for spatial communication between points. To enable processing of arbitrarily sampled point-cloud textures and ensure long-distance texture consistency we introduce a fast re-sampling of the mesh spectral properties used during the heat diffusion and introduce a novel heat-diffusion-based self-attention mechanism. Our code and pre-trained models are available at github.com/simofoti/UV3-TeD.