Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Opus 5 is just as good for this tbh and cheaper. It depends on the fidelity, there's a threshold slightly over "low poly" that Opus cannot get over. Once you get into creating foliage l-systems, or physical mob animation, or a house with realistic appliances, Opus is under the convergence threshold for a world model no matter how much time you give it, it will flail around and say it's done even though it's nowhere…
> then fit it back to the world with PCA + BB's Can you expand on this? I've tried several AI 3d generators that claim low-poly output, and they're all far off. None of them decide what belongs in the mesh vs. what should be baked in with the texture, so the poly budget lands in the wrong places.
This kind of decomposition helps to get the art composed the way you want it, though it won't help with a runtime poly budget.
But if you are intentionally doing low-poly style, it is doubtful you are (at least technologically) limited by having too many vertices on assets; you're limited by draws and submits and rendering architecture. You can push millions of animated polys with bells and whistles, postprocessing, physics etc, in the browser, at 90 FPS, on a macbook. You can have thousands of objects, but you have to cull/instance/share materials/atlas/etc, you can't just do `new THREE.Mesh` for each object -- which is what the LLMs will naively do by default unless you ask otherwise.
If resource size is a problem, meshes compress/quantize well with things like meshopt/DRACO.
