If you remember WithPoly as the AI tool that could turn a text prompt into a seamless PBR material, you are remembering the right product. It just does not exist in that form anymore.
WithPoly was one of the earlier AI texture generators aimed specifically at 3D artists. You could describe a surface, generate a seamless texture, preview it, and export supporting PBR maps. It was easy to try and had a free plan, which is probably part of the reason people still search for it years later.
Today, Poly is a completely different product.
What happened to WithPoly?
Poly shut down the original version of its product in 2023. CEO Abhay Agarwal later told TechCrunch that the company had not expected the AI image and asset generation market to become as competitive as quickly as it did. The team started talking to users about other problems in their workflows and eventually shifted toward file organization and AI search.
Poly then spent roughly two years rebuilding around that idea. When it relaunched publicly in 2025, the product was no longer an AI PBR material generator. Poly now describes itself as an intelligent cloud file browser for storing, searching, organizing, previewing, and working with files using AI.
So there is not a hidden page for the old WithPoly generator. The original product was discontinued, while the company moved in a different direction.
Why people still look for the old WithPoly texture generator
WithPoly solved a very specific problem well. Instead of searching through texture libraries for something close to the surface you had in mind, you could describe it and generate a material from the prompt.
Contemporary coverage of WithPoly described seamless textures with PBR maps including color, normal, displacement, ambient occlusion, roughness, and metalness, with resolution options from 1K through 8K. BlenderNation also reported that the free plan could generate color, normal, and height maps at 2K.
That workflow was simple enough that people still ask what happened to it. A 2024 Reddit thread titled “What happened to withpoly?” describes exactly the same confusion: someone returns looking for the texture generator and instead finds an AI file organizer. Another thread from the same period is simply users looking for a WithPoly alternative.
Part of the confusion is that older articles and AI tool directories still describe WithPoly as though the texture generator is active. Those pages are documenting the old product, not the Poly that exists today.
Looking for a WithPoly alternative?
The part of WithPoly we thought was useful was simple: describe a surface and get a material back. That is also the workflow we are building twirl around.
twirl generates tileable PBR materials from a text prompt and returns albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, and height maps. You can preview the result, keep it in your material library, and download the maps for Blender, Unreal, Unity, Godot, or another 3D workflow.
There is a free plan with five generation credits per day, so you can try it without paying first. Public materials can also be downloaded from the material library.
twirl is not affiliated with Poly or WithPoly, and it is not meant to be a recreation of the old product. The overlap is the job it does. If what you miss is typing something like old damp concrete with hairline cracks and faded paint and getting a usable PBR set back, that is the problem twirl is focused on.
There are other tools in this space too. Scenario offers a broader generative texture workflow, Polycam includes AI texture generation alongside its scanning tools, and Dream Textures brings Stable Diffusion generation into Blender. They may make more sense if you want a larger AI production suite, scanning, or a local Blender workflow.
If the thing you specifically want to replace is WithPoly's text-to-PBR workflow, twirl is built around that narrower use case.
Is WithPoly coming back?
We could not find any current indication that Poly plans to bring the old texture generator back. The company's current website and documentation are focused on its AI file browser, and its 2025 relaunch and funding were built around that new direction.
That makes the old WithPoly generator better understood as a discontinued product rather than a temporarily unavailable feature.
For 3D artists, the useful idea behind it is still very much alive: sometimes you do not want to search another material catalog. You just want to describe the surface you need and make it.
That is the part we are continuing to build at twirl.
Sources
- TechCrunch: YC-backed Poly relaunches as a cloud-hosted file storage with AI search
- Poly: The Intelligent Cloud File Browser
- Poly File Browser Documentation
- BlenderNation: Poly, Create 8K PBR Textures in Seconds with Generative AI
- CGPress: WithPoly AI powered texture generation
- Reddit: What happened to withpoly?
- Reddit: alternatives for easy AI PBR generation since WithPoly is gone
- twirl PBR material generator