Meet TC Poole, the one-person team behind Funkatron, a connected universe of 3D games, VR worlds, comics, and in-world broadcasts. He has been building it since 2021 with no team and no budget, an asset workload that would normally take a studio. Today, Meshy's AI 3D model generator is a core part of how a single creator keeps an entire universe expanding.
What Is Funkatron, and How It Began
TC describes himself as "a worldbuilder and toolmaker hiding out in the digital woods," and Funkatron is what years of that hiding have produced. It is not a stack of separate projects but one place with many doors. The VR worlds are locations inside it, the comics tell its stories, the fake newspapers report on its events, the music belongs to it, and the livestreams broadcast from within it. Step through any door and you land on the same planet.
What defines that planet is a refusal to choose between the epic and the ridiculous. Funkatron runs serious history, factions, magic systems, and wars right alongside complete nonsense, and the comedy works precisely because every corner of the world is built with care, from the grandest castle down to the plate on a farmer's table. TC has a one-line pitch that captures it better than any synopsis.
"Imagine the depth and breadth of The Silmarillion, but Mel Brooks co-wrote it."
TC Poole
Creator of Funkatron
The universe did not begin in 3D. It started in 2021, when TC, a musician sidelined during the shutdown, took his friends' advice and started streaming. To stand out in a flood of new streamers, he built scenes in OBS and performed as if broadcasting from a spaceship. Those 2D sets soon hit a ceiling: his best ideas only worked in three dimensions. So he taught himself 3D, spent long hours in Unity, and published his first virtual world in 2022. More followed, all orbiting the same planet, alongside a creative stack that now spans Unity, three.js, VRChat, GLB workflows, and a pile of self-built tools.
The 3D Asset Bottleneck of Solo Game Development
Everything in Funkatron is built around a specific feeling TC wants visitors to have: discovery. He wants people to stumble into a place and realize there is far more there than they expected — "some hidden corner of the internet or some forgotten channel from another world." That feeling only works if the world is dense enough to reward curiosity, and for a world this large, density is exactly the binding constraint. A place only feels real once it is thick with props, creatures, landmarks, architecture, and set dressing.
But the real drag was never the hero pieces. It was the in-between assets and the one-off oddities: the strange props, the minor creatures, the atmospheric details that nobody requests but everybody feels. Those are exactly what separate a world with personality from, in TC's words, generic fantasy number 700, and they are the first things a solo builder cuts when every model costs hours he does not have.
How Meshy's AI 3D Generator Fits Into the Pipeline
TC found Meshy on Twitter and sized it up the way he sizes up every tool — with interest but no illusions. He was not shopping for a replacement for imagination or taste. He wanted an AI 3D modeling tool that could survive inside a real production pipeline and clear the asset bottleneck.
It did. His workflow today is almost comically short:
- Idea — a prop, creature, or landmark Funkatron needs, however strange
- Reference image — generate a concept image with an AI image tool
- Image to 3D — turn the reference into a model with Meshy's image to 3D generation
- Placement — drop the model straight into the scene as a final asset
No outsourcing, no days lost per asset. (Meshy also offers text to 3D for creators who prefer to start from a prompt rather than a reference image.)
The Boom-n-Zoom, an outhouse with a cannon strapped to it that serves as a primary form of travel on the planet, is a perfect example of what the short pipeline unlocks.
Meshy-generated 3D vehicle flying above planet Funkatron in-gameAn idea like that normally dies at the "wouldn't it be funny if" stage, because no solo developer can justify days of modeling for a sight gag. Generated in one pass, the joke survived long enough to become a real, placeable object — and then a primary form of travel.
What surprised TC most was the momentum that follows. One good asset dropped into a scene tends to pull a whole region of worldbuilding into existence behind it.
"A prop becomes a room. A room becomes a building. A building becomes a district. A district becomes lore."
TC Poole
Creator of Funkatron
What Meshy Changed for Funkatron
The most important fact about TC's setup is that the output ships. These are not blockouts waiting for a "real" modeler who does not exist. Meshy-generated models go live as final game assets in working, professional-looking 3D web experiences, in front of a real audience. For a solo creator with no art team, that is the difference between a world he can describe and a world he can actually publish.
The clearest proof is the question his audience never asks. Across all the AI-generated 3D models now living inside Funkatron, nobody stops to ask whether any of it was made with AI. The assets simply read as part of the world.
Production-grade quality at near-zero time cost also changes the math on experimentation. When a new asset costs minutes instead of days, the strange, specific ideas that give Funkatron its character stop being rationed. More creatures get made, more landmarks get built, more odd corners get filled in, and the world grows denser and more convincing because the weird ideas finally make it all the way to the screen.
Step back from any single model and the deeper effect is on scope. TC already thinks big — by his own admission "probably irresponsibly big" — and a tool that collapses the distance between an idea and a finished asset makes that scale feel navigable instead of impossible. He is careful, though, not to hand the tool credit for his drive: "Meshy has not added to my ambition because I was an extremely ambitious maniac before." What it adds is reach.
TC calls the tool a materializer for imagination — not a substitute for direction or taste, but the thing that closes the gap between what he can picture and what he can place. A space starts to breathe once it is filled with objects that feel native to it, and generating those on demand is what lets a single person populate an entire universe.
What's Next for Funkatron — and Advice for Solo Worldbuilders
What is next for Funkatron is more of everything: more realms, more playable experiences, more in-world media, and more ways to step inside. What excites TC most is that as the internet trends toward sameness and copies of copies, a handmade universe only stands out further — and the thing visitors take away most often is inspiration.
His recommendation goes out to solo worldbuilders, indie game developers, experimental artists, and anyone trying to build something far larger than their resources should reasonably allow.
"Be brave. Create from within. If you build from a standpoint of “what does everyone want to see right now?” you will never find out who you truly are."
TC Poole
Creator of Funkatron
