[gd3kr]

Hey HN! I'm aarya (twitter.com/gd3kr) and I built BlenderGPT

Really overwhelmed with the traffic, will be defaulting to a less compute intensive model for a bit. Will try to keep up with this thread and respond to questions/comments but mostly focused on not letting BlenderGPT crash.

BlenderGPT is entirely bootstrapped and i'm really the only one on the team. Also, The required google sign in is only put in place to prevent botting/account creation abuse which is really not ideal when dealing with expensive GPU associated compute costs while generating every model.

I hope you have fun with it! DM me on twitter if you enjoy it and would like more credits to try it out.

[TheRealPomax]

You may need to rename it, though, as this is not an official Blender project. [1]

Even if "Blender" wasn't an officially trademarked name (which it is, in both the US and EU), standing on the shoulders of Open Source also means respecting their rules when it comes to using a project's name to market your own creation.

(Unless you asked for, and received, permission of course. In which case that's something you'll want to mention on the landing page so folks know you did the right thing)

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/logo/#trademark

[bhelkey]

In addition, the site claims BlenderGPT is a registered trademark ("BlenderGPT®"). I find this to be very unlikely.

[lobsterthief]

Maybe just call it “ChopperGPT” or some other synonym for “blender”

[nmfisher]

Yeah, Blender have been getting serious about enforcing their trademark recently. BlenderMarket have said that Blender asked them to rename, and they’ve been around for years, contribute to Blender fund, etc.

This will need to do the same.

[andrewmcwatters]

I know it won't hit the same if you change its name, but like the others here, I really would recommend that you come up with some new product name. Additionally, the glyph you're looking for is ™, not ®, if you're not registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

It seems like you're doing a great job, and these are some low hanging fruit you can address just to make sure you're not violating trademark law.

[pbhjpbhj]

You can use ® for registration in other countries/regions too. In UK/EU it's not registered until the end of the opposition period.

GPT and Blender are both generic terms, unless the combination is already being used or is registered then it appears - and of course this is not legal advice - that there is no infringement.

Indeed I think registration of GPT before USPTO has been refused because it is generic.

You might be breaching contract, assuming you're using ChatGPT behind the scenes, no idea; in theory they could require you not to use GPT in your product name.

Of course, being in the right is not enough. Companies/organisations can still go after you.

[jolmg]

https://www.blender.org/about/logo/

> Blender has been registered as a trademark by Blender Foundation in USA and EU. It has been used by Blender Foundation since 2002, and it’s a well recognized brand now. Although the name ‘Blender’ is a generic word (for a mixer), in the context of products or company names related to software it’s protected by trademark law.

[harrall]

Trademarks are categorical so just because Blender is an English word does not make it generic.

Two entirely different companies can even have the same trademark in two different areas of business.

[ascorbic]

GPT is generic. Blender is not, unless you're talking about kitchen equipment.

[999900000999]

This is much better than I expected.

I first asked it to generate "The last MC left" and it crested a 3rd model of a microphone.

Not winning any awards, but it's a decent model I could imagine a professional using as a template ( also works for props in the background).

The I asked it to generate "Heavy D and the Boy's"( RIP to Heavy D) and it tried to generate models of a rap group, the face textures aren't great.

Maybe add a disclaimer saying what you generate well and what you don't. Looks like a cool prototyping tool. Thank you for sharing

[Modified3019]

>and it crested a

I sat for too long trying to rationalize how the cresting of a wave became a synonym/analogous for “produce”, before I realized it was just a simple misspelling (or autocorrect) of “created”.

It kinda works honestly, I’ve seen far worse deliberate turns of phrase.

[jstummbillig]

Fantastic! 3D Modeling is such labor intensive high skill work, and tools like this will raise the floor by a ton.

It's exciting to think about everything that's going to become possible in the coming years.

[CobrastanJorji]

I want something a little related to this. I want a little auto assist tool in Blender so I can hit a keyboard shortcut, circle something, and say "extrude a square right around this area" or "close this mesh" or "make this shell a solid object." Stuff that an experienced Blender artist knows exactly how to do but might require some thinking. In other words, coding auto-assist for Blender user. Bonus points if it shows the steps.

Is that a thing?

[sambaumann]

Is this based on trellis?

[xnx]

That seems to be the main part of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42400537

[yuvalr1]

Hi aarya!

A really amazing project. I would really love using this tool, and other GenAI tools to generate art. There is one recurring problem that I don't know the answer to: how could I know that no one is going to sue me for using this kind of tool for copyright infringement? How can I know that the model I generate is not too similar or copying some artist's style somewhere?

[ronsor]

Not OP, but the answers are:

1. People can sue you for any reason, whether legitimate or not, regardless of what you do

2. Copying style is not copyright infringement, as copyright does not cover style

[doctorpangloss]

Adobe offers indemnity. You’re welcome to use their tools.

[F7F7F7]

Adobe claims their model is clean. But it trains on Adobe stock photos which are littered with Midjourney, SD and Leonardo generated images.

[chefandy]

Not for generating 3d models I don’t think.

[ur-whale]

This is fun!!

I made a thing, here's the prompt:

coffee mug with "I AM THE BOSS" written very large and horizontally on the side. Cup must hold 75 cl of liquid.

Funny thing: the tiny icon has the correct words, but the final object has something unreadable on the side.

Very nice work anyhow!

[deskr]

Nice work. It would be good to have examples (images, models and their prompt) on the front page. That might also lessen the load a bit.

[mrtksn]

Cool tool, the models I created were a bit crude though. Is there a way to increase details? Is prompting affecting it? For example in image generation adding keywords like "photorealistic, octane, HD" helps. Is this the case in this tool too?

Also, I'm curious on how this works? It appears that when you use a text prompt it first generates an image thumbnail of the model. Is it first creating an image from propmpt and then running this image to create the 3D model?

[afeezaziz]

Hi aarya, id like to contribute especially on how to make the animations in blenderGPT.

[kuczmama]

This is awesome! Thank you for building this.

[chefandy]

Where did you pull your training data from?

[bufferoverflow]

Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, and an AI company the source of their training data.

[chefandy]

Gosh-- that might be as impolite as taking people's work without notifying or compensating them to directly compete against them in a global marketplace making chintzy simulacra. But gee whiz look at the tech!

[bufferoverflow]

Woooosh.

[chefandy]

> Woooosh.

One of us is definitely having a hard time recognizing jokes.

[SubiculumCode]

The name is unacceptable. I literally thought this was a project by Blender. You are asking to get sued to oblivion.

[tags2k]

"Unacceptable"? Pretty hyperbolic response. I mean, they could just call it BlendGPT instead and nobody would be able to say a thing.

[meiraleal]

will it? It has the potential to bring so many users to Blender. That would be stupid.

[Diti]

Trademark laws mandate that you need to enforce your trademark if you want to keep it. So, yes, they will sue.

[Tomte]

No, they will write a letter first.

[richardlblair]

This guy lawsuits

[AJ007]

The trademark application should/will not be approved. This would be like naming yourself "DisneyGPT"

[ta988]

looks like it is only for google users?

[fourside]

Sorry to sound like a party pooper but this project gives off strong “fake it till you make it” vibes. Most AI projects I’ve seen share some type of information on how they work, yet this is completely devoid of it. Is this a new approach to mesh generation or is it using existing tooling? Then you’ve got the “we think it’s really good” line when it’s really just you. Like, why the hand waviness, the use of “GPT” when it doesn’t apply. There’s just something a bit off about this. Maybe it’s all fine but the the lack of information doesn’t help.

[gd3kr]

Understandable. For context, the GPT in the name comes from an earlier version of this project (https://github.com/gd3kr/blendergpt) which actually used GPT-4 to write python scripts that Blender would then execute. This would allow GPT-4 to program operations like instantiating primitives with the Blender Python API given only a text prompt (ex. "create 50 cubes")

The new version of BlenderGPT (lets call this v2) doesn't use an any autoregressive token prediction for the actual mesh generation part, so I understand why it sounds dishonest. I really just chose to stick with the name because artists really didn't seem to care about how the meshes are generated, and the term GPT became closely associated with AI.

As for the technical stuff, I've been working on BlenderGPT v2 for the past several months, and until a week ago, i had been using a custom pipeline I built borrowing and re-implementing bits of Unique3D (https://wukailu.github.io/Unique3D/) and combining it with optimized models (flow matching diffusion models etc) for intermediate steps (text to image generation). My optimizations reduced inference time from >2 minutes to only about 20 seconds. This is the model used in this demo i shared: https://x.com/gd3kr/status/1853645054721606100

And then Microsoft released Trellis (https://github.com/microsoft/TRELLIS), and it seemed to leapfrog my model's capabilities on most things. Integrating it into the pipeline wasn't too hard and so I went forward with it.

All of this is just to say that there really was a lot of effort put into the core pipeline, and the landing page was mostly an afterthought. Actively working on a more comprehensive one that covers all the points I talked about.

[ossobuco]

The problem with Trellis is that it insists on generating textures that are already illuminated. Is there a way to exclude lighting?

[simonw]

What did you use for the 2D loading images? This one is really nice: https://blendergptv2-jobs.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/generat...

[conductr]

lol at the gearing on the front wheel and the whole frame being backwards. Also no pedals or crank arms, the artwork is quite nice though

[pseudosavant]

The backwards drivetrain/steering is kind of fascinating to consider. I'd love to see someone like Colin Furze or Stuff Made Here actually make one to try it out. What would it be like to ride a bike that steered by pivoting the back wheel?

[conductr]

Would be interesting videos. Makes me think of how you have to maneuver a shopping cart if pushing backwards; as the rear wheels are fixed and front wheels rotate. At high speed it would be dicey, too easy to oversteer

[xnx]

Have you never seen a front-wheel drive rear-steer mono-pedal bike before? /s

[knowitnone]

why does it matter how it works? Either it works and people pay for it or it doesn't. Does every company owe you, the end user, an explanation on how their product works? While you're at it, maybe you can get all the secret recipes.

[brailsafe]

Well, because we're curious and this is a place where curious critical technology enthusiasts gravitate. If it doesn't do anything novel _at_all_ or if there's no story to elaborate on, go to Reddit.

Plus, many are probably tired of seeing the same thing being made repeatedly that just proxys requests to chatgpt and makes them look pretty.

[davidatbu]

I'm curious: don't you think the aggregate interest of the HN crowd is adequately measured via the voting mechanism? You seem not to find BlenderGPT as presented in its current form uninteresting, but if you accept that (voting up)=interest, many other people did. Why dismiss("go to Reddit" comment) someone else's work, that, evidently, many other HNers find interesting?

[brailsafe]

I didn't dismiss anyone's work, and I do find the upvote system to, at least in some cases, adequately represent the level interest on hn.

The question was: > why does it matter how it works?

and that's all my comment was intended to answer. Many people here are interested both in the idea of doing something enough to upvote AND are curious how something works. We're not necessarily just consoomers, we're often interested in details, but if I was buying something and wanted to know why I should, the maker should probably be able to answer why their thing is special; in this case, I'm just saying that people on HN are generally interested in how things work.

[davidatbu]

Sure, HNers are interested in explanations of how things work (I am too!).

But you specifically said that without such an explanation, products should "go to Reddit" (which presumably means, they don't belong on HN). I'll leave whether that's a "dismissal of someone's work" or not up to you, but all I'm saying is: it's evident via voting that many HNers find BlenderGPT, a tech product, interesting, even with the lack of that explanation. And so BlenderGPT does not need to "go to Reddit".

[lm28469]

> why does it matter how it works? Either it works and people pay for it or it doesn't.

It's hackernews, not aliexpress

[ilaksh]

I think that's a fair point that not every company owes the end user a recipe for how to reproduce their product.

However, it's also a fair question on Hacker News. Again, fair if they chose not to answer it.. but many people here are programmers.

Since they explained that they used an open source model and system https://github.com/Microsoft/TRELLIS, it will be possible for other developers who want to start similar businesses to launch basic competitors within a week or so, if they are ambitious about it.

I spent about 10 minutes with my agent running Claude 3.5 Sonnet New and generated most of the core code already: https://github.com/runvnc/img2blender

Although I haven't tested that and don't actually know if it will work.

[rvz]

> why does it matter how it works?

So we don't get another Theranos grift if this eventually raises money from private investors?

[rco8786]

Big difference since this product appears to demonstrate that it does work.

[9rx]

> Like, why the hand waviness, the use of “GPT” when it doesn’t apply.

While recognizing your earlier complaint of not having details of how it works, is there some reason to think it doesn't work using a generative pre-trained transformer? If we had to make an assumption about how it works, that would be my assumption. It is the go-to tool for these types of problems.