9 ms·

As someone who has tried to go through blender tutorials for multiple days, I can tell you, there is no chance I can get close to any of these examples. I thin

by elif 1y ago

As someone who has tried to go through blender tutorials for multiple days, I can tell you, there is no chance I can get close to any of these examples. I think you might be projecting your abilities a bit too much. As someone who wants to make and use 3d models, not someone who wants to be a 3d model artist, this tech is insanely useful.

echelon 1y ago
0.0001% of the population can sculpt 3D and leverage complex 3D toolchains. The rest of us (80% or whatever - the market will be big) don't want to touch those systems. We don't have the time, patience, or energy for it, yet we'd love to have custom 3D games and content quickly and easily. For all sorts of use cases. But that misses the fact that this is only the beginning. These models will soon generate entire worlds. They will eventually surpass human modeller capabilities and they'll deliver stunning results in 1/100,000th the time. From an idea, photo, or video. And easy to mold, like clay. With just a few words, a click, or a tap. Blender's days are long in the tooth. I'm short on Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine, Godot, and the like. That entire industry is going to be reinvented from scratch and look nothing like what exists today. That said, companies like CSM, Tripo, and Meshy are probably not the right solutions. They feel like steam-powered horses. Something like Genie, but not from Google.
- mxmilkiib 1y ago
  Blender will just add AI creation/editing
  - echelon 1y ago
    Why bolt magic rocket boosters onto a horse? That's like saying we'll add internet browsing and YouTube to Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS. It's weird, legacy software for a dying modality. Where we're going, we don't need geometry node editing. The diffusion models understand the physics of optics better than our hand-written math. And they can express it across a wide variety of artistic styles that aren't even photoreal. The future of 3D probably looks like the video game "Tiny Glade" mixed with Midjourney and Google Genie. And since it'll become so much more accessible, I think we'll probably wind up blending the act of creation with the act of consuming. Nothing like Blender.
    - HappyPanacea 1y ago
      > The diffusion models understand the physics of optics better than our hand-written math. How well will they do with something like creating two adjacent mirrors with 30 degree angle between them with one of them covered with varying-polarized red tinted checkerboard pattern?
      - echelon 1y ago
        I don't know. Diffusion is weird and a little uneven. They do a better job of fluid sim than most human efforts to date. And that's just one of thousands of things they do better than our math.
        topato 1y ago
        Haha, despite the 1000s of instances where it DOESNT simulate correctly. Very specifically chosen 10000-shot generated videos show somewhat impressive fluid physics... And even then, it MUST be something it's seen before. Diffusion is in NO way modeling physics in a realistic matter, there is not an infinite amount of training data to show all fluid dynamics... Now I know you're too far down the hype rabbit hole. Either that, or you lack a cursory understanding of diffusion models.
  - ilaksh 1y ago
    There are probably already a bunch of Blender Add-Ons or extensions that build with AI that are in the approval queue and just being ignored. https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/ https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/
- srid 1y ago
  This reminds me of Elon Musk's recent claims on the future of gaming: This – but in real-time – is the future of gaming and all media https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1954486538630476111 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1954486538630476111
  - darepublic 1y ago
    Just don't slap a release year on this future and I'll be compelled to agree
- fwip 1y ago
  > These models will soon generate entire worlds. They may. It's hard to expect this when we already see LLMs plateauing at their current abilities. Nothing you've said is certain.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    I don't see them plateauing. I see that they are in their infancy. So far AI people were just persistently doing the dumbest possible thing that turned out to work, with very limited understanding, insight and innovation. At some point they will buy all the gpus and all the GWh they can and will be forced to actually figure out how to really improve what they are doing. Then the real breakthroughs will start showing up. There are probably improvements of 3-4 orders of magnitude right behind the finish line of the low hanging fruit picking contest.
  - d0100 1y ago
    AI will just be cheaper procedural environments
- catlifeonmars 1y ago
  > These models will soon generate entire worlds. They will eventually surpass human modeller capabilities and they'll deliver stunning results in 1/100,000th the time. From an idea, photo, or video. And easy to mold, like clay. With just a few words, a click, or a tap. This is a pretty sweeping and unqualified claim. Are you sure you’re not just trying to sell snake oil?
  - weregiraffe 1y ago
    I'm sure he is just trying to sell snake oil.
    - echelon 1y ago
      I've been predicting this since Deep Dream (which feels like a century ago) and HN loves to naysay. I claimed three years ago that AI would totally disrupt the porn and film industries and we're practically on the cusp of it. If you can't see how these models work and can't predict how they can be used to build amazing things, then that's on you. I have no reason to lift up anybody that doubts. More opportunity on the table.
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        > I claimed three years ago that AI would totally disrupt the porn and film industries and we're practically on the cusp of it. Meh. We were on the cusp 5 years ago. Five years later, we're still on the cusp? Maybe I'm working with a different meaning of "cusp", but to me "On the cusp of $FOO" means that there is no intervening step between now and $FOO. The reality is that there are uncountable intervening steps between now and "film industry disrupted".
      - bigyabai 1y ago
        FWIW I'm a 3D modeller (hard surface Blender modelling, ~10yrs) and I've been reading your comments for a while now. Reality wasn't disrupted quite as far as you suggested, most of the naysayers that advised restraint under your comments have largely been proven right. Time and time again, you made enormous claims and then refused to back them up with evidence or technical explanations. We waited just like you asked, and the piper still isn't paid. Have you ever asked yourself why this revolution hasn't come yet? Why we're still "on the cusp" of it all? Because you can't push a button and generate better pornography than what two people can make with a VHS camera and some privacy. The platonic ideal of pornography and music and film and roleplaying video games and podcasting is already occupied by their human equivalent. The benchmark of quality in every artistic application of AI is inherently human, flawed, biased and petty. It isn't possible to commoditize human art with AI art unless there's a human element to it, no matter how good the AI gets. There's merit to discussing the technical impetus for improvement (which I'm always interested in discussing), but the dependent variables here seem exclusively social; humanity simply might never have a Beatlemania for AI-generated content.
- weregiraffe 1y ago
  > That entire industry is going to be reinvented from scratch Hey, I heard that one before! The entire financial industry was supposed to have been reinvented from scratch by crypto.
  - pomtato 1y ago
    Well it kinda did change things up a bit. Me being able to receive payments across borders without significant delay or crazy fees is a decent perk, you can hate crypto culture and grifters trying to make a quick buck but it's applications are very real.
    - ares623 1y ago
      Won’t you get taxed on “gains”when you do that and then eventually convert to fiat? I was considering this path a few years ago but all my research pointed to me being taxed for moving my own money from one country to another. Which would’ve cost significantly more than a good ol’ bank transfer. (I needed the fiat on the other end) My understanding was that as far as the receiving bank is concerned, the converted crypto would’ve appeared out of an investment/trading platform and needed to be taxed The bank transfer cost like a couple of bucks anyway so it wasn’t worth the risk of trying the crypto route in the end for me.
      - charcircuit 1y ago
        If you use stablecoins there will be no gains or losses.
- Etherlord87 1y ago
  The only sculpting example I see is the very first hat. Do you want to tell me you wouldn't be able to sculpt that? I perfectly understand the time/patience/energy argument and my bias here. But even Spore (video game) editor with all its limitations gives you a similar result to the examples provided, and at least there you are the one giving the shape to your work, which gives you more control, and your art more soul, and moreover puts you on a creative path where the results are getting better. Will the AI soon surpass human modeller? I don't know... I hear so much hype for AI, I have fallen victim to it myself where I spent quite some time trying to use AI for some serious work and guess what - it works as a search engine, it will give me a ffmpeg command that I could duckduckgo anyway, it will give me an Autohotkey script that I could figure out myself after a quick search etc. The LLM fails even at the tasks that seem optimal for it - I have tried multiple times to translate movie subtitles with it, and while the translation was better than using machine learning, at some point the AI goes crazy and decides to change the order of scenes in a movie - something that I couldn't detect until I watched the movie with friends, so it was a critical failure. I described a word, and the AI failed to give me the word I couldn't remember, and a simple search on thesaurus succeeded instead. I described what I remembered from a quote, but the AI failed to give me the quote, but my googlefu was enough to find it. You probably know how to code, and would cringe if someone suggested to you to just ask the AI to write you the code for a video game without you yourself knowing how to code to at least supervise and correct it, and yet you think the 3D modelling will be good enough without intervention of a 3D artist; maybe, but as someone experienced in 3D I just don't see it, just like I don't see AI making Hollywood movies even though a lot of people claim it's a matter of years before that becomes the reality. Instead what I see is AI slop everywhere and I'm sure video games will be filled with AI crap, just like a lot of places were filled with machine-learning translations because Google seriously suggested on its conferences that the translations are good enough (and if someone speaks only English, the Dunning-Kruger effect kicks in). Sure, eventually we might have AGI and humanity will be obsolete. But I'm not a fan of extrapolating hyperbolic data; one Youtuber made an estimation that in a couple decades Earth will be visited by aliens, because there won't be enough Earthlings to satisfy his channel viewership stats.
- jayd16 1y ago
  I think you'll come to realize that the margin between people willing to learn blender today and people looking to generate models but won't learn how today is razor thin. What's the use case of generating a model if all modelling and game engines are gone?
  - HappyPanacea 1y ago
    >What's the use case of generating a model if all modelling and game engines are gone? Because using LL3M-style technique will probably be cheaper and better (fidelity and consistency and art direction wise) than generating the entire video/game with video generation model.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    All these pro-AI framings hinge on the fact that they can't tell apart AI data from human arts. That's like saying that because they don't know what improper bounds check is the code must be secure. It's just all broken logic.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > you'll come to realize No. The Roblox of this space is going to make billions of dollars. There's going to be so much money to make here.
    - topato 1y ago
      So, an ai generated psuedo-game engine with a majority of users under the age of 13? I'm sure that WILL make a lot of money. Those of us who didn't grow up playing Roblox will find this comparison impossibly stupid. Some what related: im still amazed that no one has made a Roblox competitor, as in, a vague social building game that tricks children into wasting money on ridiculous MTXs. Maybe you are right, but I think that taking an already sorry state of affairs, and then removing the only imagination or STEM skills required by giving children access to GenAI.... is a really depressing thought. I kinda meandered with my point lol.
      - x-complexity 1y ago
- numpad0 1y ago
  100% of population has all the tools needed + ChatGPT for free to write a novel. Only 0.0001% are even able to complete even a short story - they often can't hold a complete and consistent plot in their head. "AI allows those excluded from the guild" is total BS. Gut figures, ~85% of creativity comes from skill itself. ~10% or so comes from prior arts. And it's all multiplied by willingness[0, 1] which >99.9999% of population has << 0.0001 as the value. Tools just don't change that, it just weighs down on the creativity part.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I'm with you. These solutions are all just stepping stones on the way to gen-ai realtime world generation, which doesn't even require modeling in the traditional sense. Then all these tools are cooked. The whole games industry is cooked. We're probably all going to suffer holodeck addiction and then the whole human race is cooked.
Etherlord87 1y ago
Wrong tutorials. A lot of these models consist of just taking a primitive like a sphere, scaling it, and then creating another primitive, scaling it, moving it, so you have overlapping hulls ("bad" topology). Then in shading you just create a default material and set its color. There are models in the examples that require e.g. extrusion (which is literally: select faces, press E, drag mouse). Some shapes are smoothed/subdivided with Catmul-Clark Subdivision Surface modifier, which you can add simply by pressing CTRL+2 in "Object Mode" (the digit is the number of subdivisions, basically use 1 to 3, you may set more for renders). Here's a good, albeit old tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8 Yes I made some assumptions when estimating it takes about a day to learn to make models like this: you have a free day to spend it in its entirety to learn, and as a hackernews user your IQ is over average and you're technically savvy. And last assumption: you learn skills required evenly, rather than going deep into the rabbit hole of e.g. correct topology; if you go through something like Andrew Pierce's doughnut tutorial, it may take more than a day, especially if you play around with the various functions of Blender rather than strictly following the videos - but you will end up making significantly better models than the examples presented, e.g. you will know to inset cylinder's ngons to avoid the Catmul-Clark subdiv artifacts you can see on the 2nd column of hats. > this tech is insanely useful. No, it isn't, but you don't see it, because you don't have enough experience to see it (Dunning-Kruger effect) - this is why I mentioned my experience, not to flex but to point out I have the experience required to estimate the value of this tool.
- xtracto 1y ago
  It's amazing how little understanding some people with "a gift" for certain skills have. I play guitar, it's easy and I enjoy it a lot. I've taught plsome friends to play it, and some of them just... don't have it in them. Similarly,.I've always liked drawing/painting and 3d modeling. But for some reason, that part of my brain is Just not there. I just can't do visualization. I've even tried award winning books (drawing with the right side of the brain) without success. Way back in the day I tried 3D modeling with AW maya, 3d studio max and then Blender. I WANT to convert a sphere into a nice warrior, I died to make 3d games: I had the C/C++ part covered, as well as the opengl one. But I couldn't model a trash can,.after following all tutorials and.books. This technology solves that for us who don't have that gift. I understand that for people that can "draw the rest of the fking owl" it won't look as much, but darn, it opens a world for me.
spookie 1y ago
I'm surprised if anything. All examples are really just primitives either extruded in one step or the same and maybe 5 of them together. I don't want to sound mean but these are reachable with just another day at it. They really are.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  This is like for 2d art saying line art is just using the pen tool. Sure anyone can reproduce a single stroke, but figuring out what strokes to make has such a high skill ceiling.
  - spookie 1y ago
    No, the meshes involved are in the same ballpark as children's drawings for 2D art. I'm sure the most difficult part here is just understanding blender UI. Clearly more difficult than picking up a pencil. But, a tutorial video should suffice. For the chair example you pick a face on the default cube and the use the extrude tool on the left. Now you have a base. Add 4 more cubes, and do the same. Now you have legs. Then boolean them. For the hat? Use a sphere, go to the sculpt tab and go ham. There are way better ways to do this, of course. But really, there is not such a high degree of skill involved here, nor that being just a little more patient (one more day of trying) is that much to ask.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      My point is that learning to use the tool is not the part people struggle with. The opened ended nature of creation is what is actually hard. Sure it may be primitives, but figuring out what primitives are needed, what dimensions they need, and where they should go is not easy. Everytime I attempt sculpting whatever I do turns into an abomination. That's what happens when I go ham. Not everyone with 1 day of practice are going to be perfectly able destruct what they have in their mind for what they want into parts to create or steps they need to do to get it look right.
- leviathant 1y ago
  >I don't want to sound mean but these are reachable with just another day at it. They really are. Semi-related, understanding Sketchup took a couple of false starts for me. The first time I tried it, I could not make heads or tails of what I was doing. I must have spent hours trying to figure out how to model a desk, and I gave up. Tried again a year or two later, and it just didn't click. The third try, a couple years later, it suddenly made sense, and what started as modeling a new desk out turned into modeling my room, then modeling the whole house, and now I've got a rough model of my neighborhood. And it's so easy, once you know how - there's obviously a rabbit hole of detail work one can fall down into, but the basics aren't bad.

by elif 1y ago

echelon 1y ago

0.0001% of the population can sculpt 3D and leverage complex 3D toolchains. The rest of us (80% or whatever - the market will be big) don't want to touch those systems. We don't have the time, patience, or energy for it, yet we'd love to have custom 3D games and content quickly and easily. For all sorts of use cases. But that misses the fact that this is only the beginning. These models will soon generate entire worlds. They will eventually surpass human modeller capabilities and they'll deliver stunning results in 1/100,000th the time. From an idea, photo, or video. And easy to mold, like clay. With just a few words, a click, or a tap. Blender's days are long in the tooth. I'm short on Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine, Godot, and the like. That entire industry is going to be reinvented from scratch and look nothing like what exists today. That said, companies like CSM, Tripo, and Meshy are probably not the right solutions. They feel like steam-powered horses. Something like Genie, but not from Google.

mxmilkiib 1y ago
Blender will just add AI creation/editing
- echelon 1y ago
  Why bolt magic rocket boosters onto a horse? That's like saying we'll add internet browsing and YouTube to Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS. It's weird, legacy software for a dying modality. Where we're going, we don't need geometry node editing. The diffusion models understand the physics of optics better than our hand-written math. And they can express it across a wide variety of artistic styles that aren't even photoreal. The future of 3D probably looks like the video game "Tiny Glade" mixed with Midjourney and Google Genie. And since it'll become so much more accessible, I think we'll probably wind up blending the act of creation with the act of consuming. Nothing like Blender.
  - HappyPanacea 1y ago
    > The diffusion models understand the physics of optics better than our hand-written math. How well will they do with something like creating two adjacent mirrors with 30 degree angle between them with one of them covered with varying-polarized red tinted checkerboard pattern?
    - echelon 1y ago
      I don't know. Diffusion is weird and a little uneven. They do a better job of fluid sim than most human efforts to date. And that's just one of thousands of things they do better than our math.
      - topato 1y ago
        Haha, despite the 1000s of instances where it DOESNT simulate correctly. Very specifically chosen 10000-shot generated videos show somewhat impressive fluid physics... And even then, it MUST be something it's seen before. Diffusion is in NO way modeling physics in a realistic matter, there is not an infinite amount of training data to show all fluid dynamics... Now I know you're too far down the hype rabbit hole. Either that, or you lack a cursory understanding of diffusion models.
- ilaksh 1y ago
  There are probably already a bunch of Blender Add-Ons or extensions that build with AI that are in the approval queue and just being ignored. https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/ https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/
srid 1y ago
This reminds me of Elon Musk's recent claims on the future of gaming: This – but in real-time – is the future of gaming and all media https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1954486538630476111 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1954486538630476111
- darepublic 1y ago
  Just don't slap a release year on this future and I'll be compelled to agree
fwip 1y ago
> These models will soon generate entire worlds. They may. It's hard to expect this when we already see LLMs plateauing at their current abilities. Nothing you've said is certain.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I don't see them plateauing. I see that they are in their infancy. So far AI people were just persistently doing the dumbest possible thing that turned out to work, with very limited understanding, insight and innovation. At some point they will buy all the gpus and all the GWh they can and will be forced to actually figure out how to really improve what they are doing. Then the real breakthroughs will start showing up. There are probably improvements of 3-4 orders of magnitude right behind the finish line of the low hanging fruit picking contest.
- d0100 1y ago
  AI will just be cheaper procedural environments
catlifeonmars 1y ago
> These models will soon generate entire worlds. They will eventually surpass human modeller capabilities and they'll deliver stunning results in 1/100,000th the time. From an idea, photo, or video. And easy to mold, like clay. With just a few words, a click, or a tap. This is a pretty sweeping and unqualified claim. Are you sure you’re not just trying to sell snake oil?
- weregiraffe 1y ago
  I'm sure he is just trying to sell snake oil.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I've been predicting this since Deep Dream (which feels like a century ago) and HN loves to naysay. I claimed three years ago that AI would totally disrupt the porn and film industries and we're practically on the cusp of it. If you can't see how these models work and can't predict how they can be used to build amazing things, then that's on you. I have no reason to lift up anybody that doubts. More opportunity on the table.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > I claimed three years ago that AI would totally disrupt the porn and film industries and we're practically on the cusp of it. Meh. We were on the cusp 5 years ago. Five years later, we're still on the cusp? Maybe I'm working with a different meaning of "cusp", but to me "On the cusp of $FOO" means that there is no intervening step between now and $FOO. The reality is that there are uncountable intervening steps between now and "film industry disrupted".
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      FWIW I'm a 3D modeller (hard surface Blender modelling, ~10yrs) and I've been reading your comments for a while now. Reality wasn't disrupted quite as far as you suggested, most of the naysayers that advised restraint under your comments have largely been proven right. Time and time again, you made enormous claims and then refused to back them up with evidence or technical explanations. We waited just like you asked, and the piper still isn't paid. Have you ever asked yourself why this revolution hasn't come yet? Why we're still "on the cusp" of it all? Because you can't push a button and generate better pornography than what two people can make with a VHS camera and some privacy. The platonic ideal of pornography and music and film and roleplaying video games and podcasting is already occupied by their human equivalent. The benchmark of quality in every artistic application of AI is inherently human, flawed, biased and petty. It isn't possible to commoditize human art with AI art unless there's a human element to it, no matter how good the AI gets. There's merit to discussing the technical impetus for improvement (which I'm always interested in discussing), but the dependent variables here seem exclusively social; humanity simply might never have a Beatlemania for AI-generated content.
weregiraffe 1y ago
> That entire industry is going to be reinvented from scratch Hey, I heard that one before! The entire financial industry was supposed to have been reinvented from scratch by crypto.
- pomtato 1y ago
  Well it kinda did change things up a bit. Me being able to receive payments across borders without significant delay or crazy fees is a decent perk, you can hate crypto culture and grifters trying to make a quick buck but it's applications are very real.
  - ares623 1y ago
    Won’t you get taxed on “gains”when you do that and then eventually convert to fiat? I was considering this path a few years ago but all my research pointed to me being taxed for moving my own money from one country to another. Which would’ve cost significantly more than a good ol’ bank transfer. (I needed the fiat on the other end) My understanding was that as far as the receiving bank is concerned, the converted crypto would’ve appeared out of an investment/trading platform and needed to be taxed The bank transfer cost like a couple of bucks anyway so it wasn’t worth the risk of trying the crypto route in the end for me.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      If you use stablecoins there will be no gains or losses.
Etherlord87 1y ago
The only sculpting example I see is the very first hat. Do you want to tell me you wouldn't be able to sculpt that? I perfectly understand the time/patience/energy argument and my bias here. But even Spore (video game) editor with all its limitations gives you a similar result to the examples provided, and at least there you are the one giving the shape to your work, which gives you more control, and your art more soul, and moreover puts you on a creative path where the results are getting better. Will the AI soon surpass human modeller? I don't know... I hear so much hype for AI, I have fallen victim to it myself where I spent quite some time trying to use AI for some serious work and guess what - it works as a search engine, it will give me a ffmpeg command that I could duckduckgo anyway, it will give me an Autohotkey script that I could figure out myself after a quick search etc. The LLM fails even at the tasks that seem optimal for it - I have tried multiple times to translate movie subtitles with it, and while the translation was better than using machine learning, at some point the AI goes crazy and decides to change the order of scenes in a movie - something that I couldn't detect until I watched the movie with friends, so it was a critical failure. I described a word, and the AI failed to give me the word I couldn't remember, and a simple search on thesaurus succeeded instead. I described what I remembered from a quote, but the AI failed to give me the quote, but my googlefu was enough to find it. You probably know how to code, and would cringe if someone suggested to you to just ask the AI to write you the code for a video game without you yourself knowing how to code to at least supervise and correct it, and yet you think the 3D modelling will be good enough without intervention of a 3D artist; maybe, but as someone experienced in 3D I just don't see it, just like I don't see AI making Hollywood movies even though a lot of people claim it's a matter of years before that becomes the reality. Instead what I see is AI slop everywhere and I'm sure video games will be filled with AI crap, just like a lot of places were filled with machine-learning translations because Google seriously suggested on its conferences that the translations are good enough (and if someone speaks only English, the Dunning-Kruger effect kicks in). Sure, eventually we might have AGI and humanity will be obsolete. But I'm not a fan of extrapolating hyperbolic data; one Youtuber made an estimation that in a couple decades Earth will be visited by aliens, because there won't be enough Earthlings to satisfy his channel viewership stats.
jayd16 1y ago
I think you'll come to realize that the margin between people willing to learn blender today and people looking to generate models but won't learn how today is razor thin. What's the use case of generating a model if all modelling and game engines are gone?
- HappyPanacea 1y ago
  >What's the use case of generating a model if all modelling and game engines are gone? Because using LL3M-style technique will probably be cheaper and better (fidelity and consistency and art direction wise) than generating the entire video/game with video generation model.
- numpad0 1y ago
  All these pro-AI framings hinge on the fact that they can't tell apart AI data from human arts. That's like saying that because they don't know what improper bounds check is the code must be secure. It's just all broken logic.
- echelon 1y ago
  > you'll come to realize No. The Roblox of this space is going to make billions of dollars. There's going to be so much money to make here.
  - topato 1y ago
    So, an ai generated psuedo-game engine with a majority of users under the age of 13? I'm sure that WILL make a lot of money. Those of us who didn't grow up playing Roblox will find this comparison impossibly stupid. Some what related: im still amazed that no one has made a Roblox competitor, as in, a vague social building game that tricks children into wasting money on ridiculous MTXs. Maybe you are right, but I think that taking an already sorry state of affairs, and then removing the only imagination or STEM skills required by giving children access to GenAI.... is a really depressing thought. I kinda meandered with my point lol.
    - x-complexity 1y ago
numpad0 1y ago
100% of population has all the tools needed + ChatGPT for free to write a novel. Only 0.0001% are even able to complete even a short story - they often can't hold a complete and consistent plot in their head. "AI allows those excluded from the guild" is total BS. Gut figures, ~85% of creativity comes from skill itself. ~10% or so comes from prior arts. And it's all multiplied by willingness[0, 1] which >99.9999% of population has << 0.0001 as the value. Tools just don't change that, it just weighs down on the creativity part.
qingcharles 1y ago
I'm with you. These solutions are all just stepping stones on the way to gen-ai realtime world generation, which doesn't even require modeling in the traditional sense. Then all these tools are cooked. The whole games industry is cooked. We're probably all going to suffer holodeck addiction and then the whole human race is cooked.

Etherlord87 1y ago

Wrong tutorials. A lot of these models consist of just taking a primitive like a sphere, scaling it, and then creating another primitive, scaling it, moving it, so you have overlapping hulls ("bad" topology). Then in shading you just create a default material and set its color. There are models in the examples that require e.g. extrusion (which is literally: select faces, press E, drag mouse). Some shapes are smoothed/subdivided with Catmul-Clark Subdivision Surface modifier, which you can add simply by pressing CTRL+2 in "Object Mode" (the digit is the number of subdivisions, basically use 1 to 3, you may set more for renders). Here's a good, albeit old tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8 Yes I made some assumptions when estimating it takes about a day to learn to make models like this: you have a free day to spend it in its entirety to learn, and as a hackernews user your IQ is over average and you're technically savvy. And last assumption: you learn skills required evenly, rather than going deep into the rabbit hole of e.g. correct topology; if you go through something like Andrew Pierce's doughnut tutorial, it may take more than a day, especially if you play around with the various functions of Blender rather than strictly following the videos - but you will end up making significantly better models than the examples presented, e.g. you will know to inset cylinder's ngons to avoid the Catmul-Clark subdiv artifacts you can see on the 2nd column of hats. > this tech is insanely useful. No, it isn't, but you don't see it, because you don't have enough experience to see it (Dunning-Kruger effect) - this is why I mentioned my experience, not to flex but to point out I have the experience required to estimate the value of this tool.

xtracto 1y ago
It's amazing how little understanding some people with "a gift" for certain skills have. I play guitar, it's easy and I enjoy it a lot. I've taught plsome friends to play it, and some of them just... don't have it in them. Similarly,.I've always liked drawing/painting and 3d modeling. But for some reason, that part of my brain is Just not there. I just can't do visualization. I've even tried award winning books (drawing with the right side of the brain) without success. Way back in the day I tried 3D modeling with AW maya, 3d studio max and then Blender. I WANT to convert a sphere into a nice warrior, I died to make 3d games: I had the C/C++ part covered, as well as the opengl one. But I couldn't model a trash can,.after following all tutorials and.books. This technology solves that for us who don't have that gift. I understand that for people that can "draw the rest of the fking owl" it won't look as much, but darn, it opens a world for me.

spookie 1y ago

I'm surprised if anything. All examples are really just primitives either extruded in one step or the same and maybe 5 of them together. I don't want to sound mean but these are reachable with just another day at it. They really are.

charcircuit 1y ago
This is like for 2d art saying line art is just using the pen tool. Sure anyone can reproduce a single stroke, but figuring out what strokes to make has such a high skill ceiling.
- spookie 1y ago
  No, the meshes involved are in the same ballpark as children's drawings for 2D art. I'm sure the most difficult part here is just understanding blender UI. Clearly more difficult than picking up a pencil. But, a tutorial video should suffice. For the chair example you pick a face on the default cube and the use the extrude tool on the left. Now you have a base. Add 4 more cubes, and do the same. Now you have legs. Then boolean them. For the hat? Use a sphere, go to the sculpt tab and go ham. There are way better ways to do this, of course. But really, there is not such a high degree of skill involved here, nor that being just a little more patient (one more day of trying) is that much to ask.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    My point is that learning to use the tool is not the part people struggle with. The opened ended nature of creation is what is actually hard. Sure it may be primitives, but figuring out what primitives are needed, what dimensions they need, and where they should go is not easy. Everytime I attempt sculpting whatever I do turns into an abomination. That's what happens when I go ham. Not everyone with 1 day of practice are going to be perfectly able destruct what they have in their mind for what they want into parts to create or steps they need to do to get it look right.
leviathant 1y ago
>I don't want to sound mean but these are reachable with just another day at it. They really are. Semi-related, understanding Sketchup took a couple of false starts for me. The first time I tried it, I could not make heads or tails of what I was doing. I must have spent hours trying to figure out how to model a desk, and I gave up. Tried again a year or two later, and it just didn't click. The third try, a couple years later, it suddenly made sense, and what started as modeling a new desk out turned into modeling my room, then modeling the whole house, and now I've got a rough model of my neighborhood. And it's so easy, once you know how - there's obviously a rabbit hole of detail work one can fall down into, but the basics aren't bad.