Advances in

icon Neural 3D Mesh Texturing:

A Survey

Simon Fraser University
Eurographics STAR (Computer Graphics Forum), 2026   icon

TL;DR.  We survey Neural 3D Mesh Texturing, covering foundations, guidance, and methods ranging from GANs to diffusion, along with datasets, metrics, applications, and open challenges.

icon Abstract

Texturing 3D meshes plays a vital role in determining the visual realism of digital objects and scenes. Although recent generative 3D approaches based on Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splatting can produce textured assets directly, polygonal meshes remain the core representation across modeling, animation, visual effects, and gaming pipelines. Neural 3D mesh texturing therefore continues to be an essential and active area of research. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in neural 3D mesh texturing, covering methods for texture synthesis, transfer, and completion. We first summarize key foundations in mesh geometry, texture mapping, differentiable rendering, and neural generative models, and then organize the literature into a unified taxonomy spanning early GAN-based methods to modern diffusion-based pipelines. We further analyze common architectures and supervision strategies, review datasets and evaluation protocols, and discuss emerging applications, practical/commercial systems, and open challenges. Together, these insights provide a structured perspective on the current landscape and help guide future developments in learning-based 3D mesh texturing.


Check out our paper to learn more. 🙂

icon Neural 3D Mesh Texturing

A growing list of works in Neural 3D Mesh Texturing. Each work is characterized by Model (the type of model being used), Guidance (the type of stylistic guidance which controls texture appearance), Model Type (whether the model is pre-trained, fine-tuned, or custom trained for the texturing task), Generation Strategy (the way textures are generated: Optimization / Iterative / Synchronized / Feed-Forward), and Texture Type (RGB textures, with baked-in lighting effects, or disentangled PBR materials).

Note: This list is not exhaustive. If we missed your work or tagged it incorrectly, please submit a correction or addition via our GitHub repository.

icon BibTeX


@article{perla2026NeuralMeshTexSurvey,
    author = {Perla, Sai Raj Kishore and Mahdavi-Amiri, Ali and Zhang, Hao},
    title = {Advances in Neural 3D Mesh Texturing: A Survey},
    journal = {Eurographics STAR (State of The Art Reports), Computer Graphics Forum},
    volume = {45},
    number = {2},
    pages = {e70392},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.70392},
    url = {https://sairajk.github.io/neural-mesh-texturing},
    year = {2026}
}