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An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

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Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#51

Post by nottorp »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #8

Somehow 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…

> Similarly, you can slap that AI generated 3D model right into your game engine, with its terrible topology and have it perform "ok".

You can't, because NVidia is selling all their chips to "AI" and you don't have any chips left to run the "AI" generated models on.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#52

Post by rcxdude »

cyberrock wrote: post #39

>If a client asks, "Can you make the handle slightly longer?", on the human model, I can select a loop of polygons and pull. The edit is done in 10 seconds. >On the AI model, I cannot. There are no loops. I would have to sculpt it like clay, destroying the texture in the process. It is actually faster to rebuild the entire model from scratch than to try and fix the AI's topology. To play devil's advocate for a second…

It would also likely run into the non-determinism issue that a lot of generative AI has, where you can edit the input data, but you're not going to get the same output with only the edit you wanted, but instead a completely new output. For images the tools are getting better with editing models, but they're still prone to being a bit difficult to control, and there's no analog for 3d model generation at the moment.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#53

Post by inigyou »

bsenftner wrote: post #49
koakuma-chan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not so sure about that. All major software companies have enjoyed exponentially rising profits alongside steadily declining quality.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#54

Post by pablonaj »

sech8420 wrote: post #14
Miraste wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luma, Rodin, Tripo are a few. Meshy has some of these features too Unfortunately they are all proprietary, but 3D models are sort of a side area in AI research, so most of the effort is from small startups.

In no capacity do these create clean topo, textures, and uvs. If you do not believe me, use the reference image from the post and upload it to Meshy or Tripo and see what happens. Yes, slightly better than the open source Trellis, but still nearly impossible to work with and a model you would never put on any slightly serious eCommerce site. We've tried them all. If one existed, it would save us money, speed up our p…

Hunyuan 3.1 is very good and you should try it if you haven't, has great resolution, topology and textures are messy, but things are moving so fast that I think these issues will be solved in the next couple of years.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#55

Post by filoeleven »

boomlinde wrote: post #37
Keyframe wrote: post #4

Nice copium. These things are going to get there fast. Even what has been shown can be a good start with a decimator at hand; We've seen this with photogrammetry before. Irony is not lost on the fact that text, which complains about it, went through AI itself.

Describing things as they are is copium, but defending things based on what you hope they'll be is not?

No, that is hopium.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#56

Post by torginus »

Afaik a lot of AI generated models aren't really 'AI generated' in the sense that you have an network that outputs vertices and topologies and UV maps.

3D AI models are usually made by a grab bag of techniques, for example you use diffusion to output color and depth maps from multiple angles, then you try to put the results into a voxel grid with 3D reconstruction techniques, after which you run an algorithm like Marching Cubes to get a crappy mesh, and then you do decimate the mesh via some algorithm.

So yeah, the outputted model is built out nothing like a 3D artist would have, might look okay, but you won't find any structure in the output.

I don't think it's worth using them as anything in an artist pipleline except maybe as reference for retopo.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#57

Post by MITSardine »

rcarmo wrote: post #45

I 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.

That's pretty impressive! However this workflow could have trouble dealing with the types of meshes coming out of those 3D generative algorithms. Geometries are arbitrary (not simple geometric shapes) so you'll have to fit with NURBS, and the meshes are noisy so that'll struggle/be somewhat arbitrary (what do you consider feature, what do you consider noise?).

However you highlight what I think is the way forward: using scriptable CAD that can leverage LLMs or, maybe in the future, specialized generative algorithms that output in a sane geometry specification.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#58

Post by kunai »

bsenftner wrote: post #49
koakuma-chan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you only knew how the enterprise space does stuff you'd realize how little a priority maintainability is.

I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#59

Post by whywhywhywhy »

3D modeling is one where AI is going to topple existing methods with ease in all situations where clean polys and UVs are not required. Same way 3D scanned assets have. I won't be surprised at all if say the next Elder Scrolls game all the junk items are AI generated models.

Modeling is just so insanely time consuming and requires such a broad range of skills to do competently that the last day I have to look at a UV map I'm never going back.

Re: An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop

#60

Post by sech8420 »

brikym wrote: post #34

The 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.

Yes the tech will catch up but a clean svg and a clean glb are so vastly different from one another that it's hardly worth making the comparison.
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