[aabhay]

I have to be a soggy blanket person, but there are some pretty strong reasons why 3D generative AI is going to have a much shallower adoption cycle than 2D. (I founded a company that was likely the first generative AI company for 3D assets)

1. 3D is actually a broad collection of formats and not a single thing or representation. This is because of the deep relation between surface topology and render performance. 2. 3D is much more challenging to use in any workflow. Its much more physical, and the ergonomics of 3DOF makes it naturally hard to place in as many places as 2D 3. 3D is much more expensive to produce per unit value, in many ways. This is why, for example, almost every indie web comic artist draws in 2D instead of 3D. In an ai first world it might be less “work” but will still be leaps and bounds more expensive.

In my opinion, the media that have the most appeal for genAI are basically (in order)

- images - videos - music - general audio - 2D animation - tightly scoped 3D experiences such as avatars - games - general 3D models.

My conclusion from being in this space was that there’s likely a world where 3D-style videos generated from pixels are more poised to take off than 3D as a data type.

[noduerme]

You skipped an important market segment. Porn. The history of technology for making and distributing images, from cave paintings to ancient Rome through the Renaissance, Betamax, Photoshop, Tomb Raider and Instagram filters, has always been driven by improving the rendering of boobs.

[robust-cactus]

At this point GLTF seems pretty darn good and seems broadly usable. It embeds the mesh, textures, animations right in a single file. It can represent a single model or a scene. I also has a binary format.

3d need not be so complicated! We've kinda made it complicated but a simplification wave is likely coming.

The big unlock for 3d though will have to be some better compression technology. Games and 3d experiences are absolutely massive.

[catgary]

There’s a middle ground in animation where you use techniques like text2motion with pre-existing assets that, I think, has a lot of appeal for games.

[fartfeatures]

Doesn't Nvidia's USD format solve the multiple formats issue?

[unconed]

I think you mean Pixar's.

USD was designed for letting very large teams collaborate on making animated movies.

It's actually terrible as an interchange format. e.g. The materials/shading system is both overengineered and underdefined. It is entirely application specific.

For the parts of USD that do work well, we have better and/or more widely supported standards, like GLTF and PBR.

It was a very dumb choice to push this anywhere.

[fartfeatures]

Yeah that's the one. Did you see they were phasing out the materials support in it for materialX?