[empath-nirvana]

> A competent modeler can make these types of meshes in under 5 minutes.

I don't think this general complaint about AI workflows is that useful. Most people are not a competent <insert job here>. Most people don't know a competent <insert job here> or can't afford to hire one. Even something that takes longer than a professional do at worse quality for many things is better than _nothing_ which is the realistic alternative for most people who would use something like this.

[chefandy]

> I don't think this general complaint about AI workflows is that useful

Maybe not to you, but it's useful if you're in these fields professionally, though. The difference between a neat hobbyist toolkit and a professional toolkit has gigantic financial implications, even if the difference is minimal to "most people."

[ajuc]

Linux vs Unix. Wikipedia vs Britannica. GCC vs Intel compiler. Good enough free hobby toy beats expansive professional tools given enough hobbysts.

[chefandy]

First, we're talking about the state of the technology and what it can produce, not the fundamental worthiness of the approach. Right now, it's not up to the task. In the earliest phases of those technologies, they also weren't good enough for for professional use cases.

Secondly, the number of hobbyists only matters if you're talking about hobbyists that develop the technology-- not hobbyists that use the technology. Until those tools are good enough, you could have every hobbyist on the planet collectively attempting to make a Disney-quality character model with tools that aren't capable of doing so and it wouldn't get much closer to the requisite result than a single hobbyist doing the same.

[johnnyanmac]

1. they don't beat them outight. It's simply more accessible.

2. those "hobbyists" in all examples are in fact professionals now. That's why they could scale up.

[stuckinhell]

Blender is an another good example

[hutzlibu]

Blender was a professional tool from the start. The company behind it went insolvent ... and with crowdfunding the source could be freed.

[chefandy]

Right-- being open source doesn't automatically mean it's an amateur tool or has its roots in a collective hobbyist effort.

[cannonpalms]

Is the target market really "most people," though? I would say not. The general goal of all of this economic investment is to improve the productivity of labor--that means first and foremost that things need to be useful and practical for those trained to make determinations such as "useful" and "practical."

[taneq]

Millions of people generating millions of images (some of them even useful!) using Dall-E and Stable Diffusion would say otherwise. A skilled digital artist could create most of these images in an hour or two, I’d guess… but ‘most people’ certainly could not, and it turns out that these people really want to.

[reubenmorais]

Are those millions of people actually creating something of lasting value, or just playing around with a new toy?

[Filligree]

Is there a problem with the latter?

[willy_k]

A lot, but how many people will start with the latter but find themselves (capable of) doing the former?

[taneq]

They're creating lasting value for themselves. Or don't you think they should be allowed to?

[johnnyanmac]

>Most people don't know a competent <insert job here> or can't afford to hire one

May be relevant in the long run, but it'll probably be 5+ years before this is commercially available. And it won't be cheap either, so out of the range of said people who can't hire a competent <insert job here>

That's why a lot of this stuff is pitched to companies with competent people instead of offered as a general product to download.

[jamilton]

Is there a reason to expect it'd be significantly more expensive than current-gen LLM? Reading the "Implementation Details" section, this was done with GPT2-medium, and assuming running it is about as intensive as the original GPT2, it can be run (slowly) on a regular computer, without a graphics card. Seems reasonable to assume future versions will be around GPT-3/4's price.

[22c]

Agreed! There's also no way this is 5 years away from being viable.

I just checked the timestamps on my Dall-E Mini generated images. They're dated June 2022

This is what people were doing on commodity hardware back then:

https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/165537...

This is what people are doing on commodity hardware now:

https://civitai.com/images/3853761

I'm not even going to try to predict what we'll be able to do in 2 years time; even when accounting for the current GenAI hype/bubble!

[johnnyanmac]

Perhaps not, but it begs the question of if GPT is affordable for a dev to begin with. I don't know how they would monetize this sort of work so it's hard to say. But making game models probably requires a lot more processing power than generating text or static images.

[hipadev23]

> but it'll probably be 5+ years before this is commercially available

I think you should look at the progress of image, text, and video generation over the past 12 months and re-asses your timeline prediction.

[LarsDu88]

I have no doubt that 3d modeling will become commodified in the same way that art has with the dawn of AI art generation over the past year.

I honestly think we'll get there within 18 months.

My skepticism is whether the technique described here will be the basis of what people will be using in ~2 years to replace their low level static 3d asset generation.

There are several techniques out there, leveraging different sources of data right now. This looks like a step in the right direction, but who knows.

[pasabagi]

People still do wood block printing - even though printing is commodified to the nines.

At the moment, making 3d models is a lot of skilled, monotonous work, especially for stuff like scene furniture. I guess I'd be pretty happy if some of that work could be automated away, and I'm pretty confident that there's no point automating away the remainder, for the same reason you don't want ChatGPT writing your screenplay.

[johnnyanmac]

Availability =/= viability. I'm sure as we speak some large studios are already leveraging this work or are close to leveraging it.

But this stuff trickles down to the public very slowly. Because indies aren't a good audience to sell what is likely an expensive tech that is focused on mid-large scale production.

[willy_k]

Yes but no, none of that really describes current development.

[johnnyanmac]

perhaps, but I was responding to

>Most people are not a competent <insert job here>. Most people don't know a competent <insert job here> or can't afford to hire one.

emphasis mine. Affordability doesn't have much to do with capabilities, but it is a strong factor to consider for an indie dev. Devs in fields (games, VFX) that don't traditionally pay well to begin with.

[willy_k]

Yes, but you were also saying that it would be that way in 5 years, and if you look at the cases for which these tools were practical at the start of 2023 compared to the practical applications now, not even a full year of progress, the relevance of your argument to the reality of the scene is not clear.

[stuckinhell]

The open source art ai community is far more mature than people think.

[johnnyanmac]

2d, maybe. 3D, I haven't seen anything close to a game ready asset.