Wanted to experiment with making a LoRA for applying textures/patterns to things, so I picked a strong candidate for the most famous texture of all: The Source engine default texture, used when a user is missing a texture in Source engine games. This was most prominently seen in Gmod due to mods using Valve owned textures from Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source that they didn’t redistribute for legal and space reasons. As of July 2025 Gmod contains most of these textures by default, but the missing texture texture can still be seen due to other issues.

Tag: mtex [item] and checkered [item]. e.g., “mtex shirt, checkered shirt”, “mtex socks, checkered socks”, “mtex couch, checkered couch”

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Made with 21 pics: 7 2D parodies, 8 3D examples (more deliberately added to other games than the actual error), and 6 real items with the texture.

I've seen this kind of thing work by accident (texture of a piece of clothing that wound up applyable to anything) several times so not sure what failed. Wonder if it needs a recognized word to "overwrite"? Maybe it needs a primary article of clothing to apply it to?

V2 works way better. Took till epoch 3 for the couch to get the texture applied, and 5 for the shirt to have the proper checkering. Thus I suspect this kind of trickery (at least in Illustrious) both needs a bit more data than a near minimum size dataset, and has to hijack an existing tag instead of just being able to make arbitrary prefix triggers. Sample pic 3 was a bust since it doesn’t seem to understand this as skin (but there’s none in training data), but started getting generic checkered shirt at epoch 2 and a “no texture” shirt at epoch 5. Not sure if overbaked or Civitai's current issues with drawing magenta are causing issues with it.