How PoE Hideout Art Actually Works

Hideout art looks like a painting, but it is made of individual decorations, each with its own position, rotation and variation. Here is what the generator does between the moment you upload an image and the moment you import a hideout full of decorations.

1. Finding the subject

First the generator decides what to build. If your image has transparency, it keeps it. Otherwise it removes only the background that touches the image border. That detail matters: white parts inside the subject, like eyes, teeth and highlights, stay part of the art instead of being cut out.

2. Simplifying colours and finding outlines

A typical image has thousands of colours, but the game camera can only show a handful of decoration families clearly. The generator groups the image into a small set of colour regions, cleans up tiny specks, and detects dark, thin lines as line art.

3. Knowing every decoration

Every decoration in the catalogue was rendered from the game's own meshes and textures, viewed from above like the hideout camera. From those renders the generator knows each decoration's real:

• colour, measured in a perceptual colour space so "close" means close to the eye,
• footprint: its size and shape on the floor,
• texture: whether it reads as smooth, rough or speckled.

4. Matching colours to decorations

For each colour region the generator picks the decoration that matches best. A few rules keep the result readable:

• Different colours get different decorations, so neighbouring areas never blur together.
• Light and dark stay in order: if the original's yellow is brighter than its orange, the decorations are too.
• Thin regions get small pieces, so a region too narrow for a big rug still gets filled.

5. Placing every piece

Placement works from big to small:

1. Big pieces fill the inside of each region quickly.
2. Smaller pieces finish the edges, rotated to follow the outline's direction.
3. A dark "brush" decoration traces the line art and the outer edge.

Every piece snaps to whole hideout coordinates as it is placed, exactly like the game stores it, so the preview shows precisely what the file contains.

6. Rendering the preview

The preview is drawn from the same renders, at each piece's real position and rotation, on the floor of the hideout you chose. If something looks wrong in the preview, it would look wrong in game too, which is why you can change settings and preview again before downloading anything.

7. Writing the .hideout file

Finally the generator writes a .hideout file in the same format the game exports. It includes your hideout's functional objects (stash, waypoint, benches, masters) unless you chose otherwise, plus every decoration of the artwork. You import it with the game's own Import button.

Why not just a pixel grid?

Older tools placed one decoration per pixel on a square grid. That gives blocky edges, wastes pieces on flat areas and loses fine detail. Following the shapes of the drawing uses big pieces where they fit and small pieces only where they are needed, which is why generated art looks hand-placed.

See it on real artworks

Every art guide breaks down one artwork: the exact decorations used, how each colour was matched, and the counts for PoE 1 and PoE 2.