Quickstart

After setup, one sentence is enough.

This is a low-poly fantasy game. Add an orc warrior matching our style.

Let your agent do the setup

You are probably reading this inside a coding agent already. Paste this into it and it will install the MCP server and the skill, then tell you what it did. You still need a key — step 1 below — but nothing else here has to be done by hand.

Prefer to do it yourself? The same three steps, manually:

Get a key

Alpha keys are founder-minted — email hello@meshgenie.com with what you're building. You'll get one that looks like mg_alpha_…. Builds are complimentary during alpha; there is no paid tier yet.

Keep it in your environment or in the MCP config below. It is a bearer credential: anything that holds it can spend your quota, so don't commit it.

Install the MCP server

Two slash commands, inside Claude Code. This installs the MCP server and the skill together:

/plugin marketplace add meshgenie/skills
/plugin install meshgenie@meshgenie

Claude Code then prompts you for your API key. The input is masked and the value goes to your OS keychain — it never touches a config file or your shell history, which is the one thing every other option on this page gets wrong.

Skip the skill step below; the plugin already includes it.

Your agent should now list nine MeshGenie tools. To check the key itself rather than the connection, the same package ships a CLI:

npx -y -p @meshgenie/mcp meshgenie whoami

key      mg_alpha_d621de5… (your label)
quota    20/20 concepts left today
billing  builds are complimentary during alpha

Environment

Variable	Required	Meaning
`MESHGENIE_API_KEY`	yes	your `mg_alpha_…` key
`MESHGENIE_API_BASE`	no	defaults to `https://meshgenie.com/api/v1`
`MESHGENIE_PROJECT_ROOT`	no	where files are written; defaults to the working directory

Agent skill — optional, recommended

The MCP gives your agent the capability; the skill gives it the judgment — how to prompt, why style locks, and that generation takes minutes.

npx skills add meshgenie/skills

Or copy skills/meshgenie/SKILL.md into your agent's skills folder — .claude/skills/meshgenie/ for Claude Code.

Ask for a character

In your game repo, talk to your agent normally.

Initialise once — "Set up MeshGenie for this Unity project with the lowpoly-heroic style." Detects your engine, writes .meshgenie/project.json, and locks the style.
Ask for concepts — "Show me concept art for a red orc warrior with tusks." Free, 20/day. You get several images and pick one.
Approve — "The second one. Build it." Mesh, 66-bone skeleton, skinning and named animation clips, written into your project.

Generation takes a few minutes. Your agent polls the job and reports progress by stage (3d, rig, animate) — if it shows you a percentage, it's making that up.

What "done" looks like

Assets/Characters/orc-warrior/orc-warrior.glb      mesh + skeleton + clips
Assets/MeshGenie/Receipts/orc-warrior.json         profile name + sha, poly budget, stages
.meshgenie/project.json                            so the next asset matches this one

Drop the .glb into a scene. The clips are named animations on the rig.

Three things that will save you time

One style per game. Lock a style profile once. The profile freezes at the concept step and a build cannot change it — that is deliberate, and it's why assets made weeks apart still match. Changing style means a new concept, not a re-skin.

Describe the subject, not the art direction. "Orc warrior, deep red skin, tusks, iron pauldron on the left shoulder" works. "Cool epic fantasy guy mid-attack" does not — see prompting.

Approving is a decision, not a delay. Nothing is built until you pick a concept. That's why concepts are free and builds are not.

If something goes wrong

Symptom	Cause
`missing_api_key`	`MESHGENIE_API_KEY` isn't reaching the server process — check the `env` block, not your shell
`401 invalid_key`	key revoked or mistyped; `whoami` confirms it
`429 quota_exceeded`	20 free concepts per key per day, resets at UTC midnight
`style_profile_frozen`	you passed a style to a build; start a new concept instead
Agent invents a `%` complete	it's ignoring the skill — progress is stage-based only

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