Lafite: A Generative Latent Field for 3D Native Texturing

摘要

Generating high-fidelity, seamless textures directly on 3D surfaces, a process we term 3D-native texturing, is a fundamental open challenge, promising to overcome the limitations of traditional UV-based and multi-view projection methods. While promising, existing native approaches are bottlenecked by the lack of a powerful and versatile latent representation, severely limiting the fidelity of generated results. In this work, we identify this representation gap as the central roadblock to progress. We introduce Lafite, a framework that resolves this challenge by learning to generate textures as a 3D generative sparse latent color field. At its core, Lafite leverages a variational autoencoder (VAE) to encode complex surface appearance into a sparse, structured latent space and then decoded into a continuous color field. This novel representation achieves unprecedented fidelity, i.e., yielding a >10 dB PSNR improvement in reconstruction over state-of-the-art methods, by effectively disentangling texture from mesh topology and UV parameterizations. Building on this superior representation, a conditional rectified flow model synthesizes textures with state-of-the-art quality and coherence. Extensive experiments show that Lafite not only sets a new standard for native texturing but also enables flexible downstream applications like editing and material synthesis, paving the way for the next generation of 3D content creation workflows.