Pillows: AI + 3D
Skills
3D Visuals
Visual Design
Experiments
Client
Self
Location
Skillman, NJ
Year
2026
Info
I’ve been playing with Cinema 4D simulations and procedural textures to see if AI can actually improve a 3D workflow rather than just replacing it. Here is how it went.
The results aren't at a photorealistic level yet. The textures still need a bit of perfection, and I am going to keep tweaking the nodes until they hit that mark. That said, I am sharing the progress now because the results look pretty awesome.
Process
Process Breakdown
• I started with a simple primitive square and ran a balloon simulation. Once it hit that perfect floating pillow look, I cached the frame and converted it to an object state to lock in the geometry.
• I used Adobe Firefly to generate a plain plastic version of that pillow to use as a reference for the base material.
• I moved into WeavyAI to try to map velvet gradient patches onto the plastic. I am a big fan of node-based editors, so driving image models through a graph felt right.
• After testing a few different models, Nano Banana was the only one that actually followed the instructions and got the velvet patches right.
I had Gemini draft a texture workflow for the C4D setup. I already had my own version running, but I wanted to see where our logic diverged.
• I used an image of heat maps as inspiration for my color palette for the velvet patches.
