Those handcrafted "clean UVs" drive me crazy. They're a bunch of clean horizontal and vertical lines, but shapes are overlapping. It looks like what blender does automatically.
An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#42Some of the defects are attributable to the critical:
> AI models generate meshes using "isosurface extraction" or similar volume-to-mesh techniques
This creates the "lumpiness", the inability to capture sharp or flat features, and the over-refinement. Noisy surface is also harder to clean up. How do you define what's a feature and what's noise when there's no ground truth beyond the mesh itself?
Implicit surface methods are expensive (versus if-everything-goes-right of the parametric alternative), but they have the advantage of being robust and simple to implement with much fewer moving parts. So it's a pragmatic choice, why not.
3D generative algorithms might become much better once they can rely on parametric surfaces. Then you can do things like symmetry, flatness, curvature that makes sense, much more naturally. And the mesh generation on top will produce very clean meshes, if it succeeds. That is a crucial missing piece: CAD to mesh is hardly robust with human-generated CAD, so I can't imagine what it'd be with AI-generated CAD. An interesting challenge to be sure.
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#43The tech will catch up in a year or two. Gemini 3.1 pro can now turn a basic raster logo into fairly clean SVG. Six months ago the SOTA models where no where near completing this task.
Yeah, it will soon generate clean CAD designs, build a PCB and schematics, select the best electronics components and optimize it for you, and even simulate RF and waves propagations.
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#44I do wonder what the outcome would've been had the 4 hours been spent in perfecting the input to the AI-generator. It's not a fair comparison if the same amount of time is not spent on both.
How good mesh can a human produce in the time that it took for the gen-AI?
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#45I give it two weeks until people start running the meshes through AI:
https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/16/1334
Claude Opus was able to perfectly replicate an angular/functional part without decimating it, so I would expect the next step to be explicitly instructing AI to clean up meshes.
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#46Everyone needs to quit trying to one-shot, and quit assuming AI can’t do it because it can’t one-shot it. Since the author can enumerate the problems and describe them, it’d be interesting to just use the one-shot pickleball racket model as a starting point . Generate it, look at the problems, then ask an agent to build “fixers” for each problem - small scripts (that they don’t need to build themselves!) which addres…
That’s not really how 3D modelling works. You can’t just improve some of the model. You have to improve all of it. Fixing to top of the paddle also changes how the junction at the handle goes and so on. That’s why no one has solved ai 3D modelling yet. It’s like asking a gymnast to learn how to do the second half of a handspring first, and then for step 2 they can learn the first half. It doesn’t work like that.
What about the triangle soup issue? Could a model tackle that by somehow combining triangles?
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#47Everyone needs to quit trying to one-shot, and quit assuming AI can’t do it because it can’t one-shot it. Since the author can enumerate the problems and describe them, it’d be interesting to just use the one-shot pickleball racket model as a starting point . Generate it, look at the problems, then ask an agent to build “fixers” for each problem - small scripts (that they don’t need to build themselves!) which addres…
But if you already know how to 3D model manually, like the author does, why would you spend all that time trying to fix the AI output? For users capable of creating such outputs themselves, the time saving is the point.
If you don’t know how to do it manually then of course that time is well worth it.
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#48Somehow this article explains perfectly, visually, how AI generated code differs from human generated code as well. You see the exact same patterns. AI uses more code to accomplish the same thing, less efficiently. I'm not even an AI hater. It's just a fact. The human then has to go through and cleanup that code if you want to deliver a high-quality product. Similarly, you can slap that AI generated 3D model right in…
But what business value does high quality code bring? /s
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#49Somehow this article explains perfectly, visually, how AI generated code differs from human generated code as well. You see the exact same patterns. AI uses more code to accomplish the same thing, less efficiently. I'm not even an AI hater. It's just a fact. The human then has to go through and cleanup that code if you want to deliver a high-quality product. Similarly, you can slap that AI generated 3D model right in…
But what business value does high quality code bring? /s
Maintainability, which in the long run is more expensive in market opportunity costs than anybody admits.
Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
#50This reminds me of the latest Ken Stanley paper on representations.
“Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis“