I’m not sure where I’m at on generative AI yet; creative democratization, the death of human creativity, theft, i dunno it’s running the gamut.  Got a smirk out of this recently though:

1990s techies: Imagine a World Wide Web where all human knowledge can be shared and accessed by everyone.
2020s techbros: We will steal every word you’ve ever shared, every artwork you’ve ever displayed, lock them away in datasets without your permission, then sell them all back to you, but shite.

Anyways, I don’t keep up too much on the field, but this Text To 3D – https://www.tripo3d.ai showed up on my radar a couple weeks ago. I first tried it out by generating stacks and rows of 3D books but the topologies of the meshes it generates are pretty messy, heavy and are all triangulated.  Though, they do have the potential to be usable after cleaning them up a bit.  And like all this AI shit, it’s moving at warp speed so nice, clean edge loops and quad based meshes can’t really be too far ahead.

This afternoon I saw something that reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try to generate something more complex than books, hands.  I used Tripo3d for the text to 3D model generation then exported, converted and imported the AI generated models into 3ds Max.

1st prompt left: a strong, delicate female hand with elegant well manicured nails
2nd prompt right: an open palmed, strong, delicate female hand that has 4 elegant fingers and 1 thumb each with well manicured fingernails

This is just a preview from inside of Max with default lighting after importing both models then just throwing rotation keys on them.  They’re each 50k polys, have UVW mapping and have 1, 2k texture map.  I’m impressed as hell.  I mean you aren’t going to want this stuff inside of realtime\online engines, but for illustrative purposes or for any offline rendering this is amazing.  The hand on the right isn’t perfect but even in its current state I couldn’t get it there using traditional modeling techniques in the 25 seconds that the hardware behind Tripo3d did it in.  And with a unique texture map.

I can see an AI tab in Max becoming a useful thing.  Wild.