I understand that Meshy 3 D has an app that works with Blender. What are your thoughts on the 3D Generators? I really trust this site, and would like your counsel. Thanks,
Pauline.
It generates a 3D model from an image I see. I go with the general opinion of, know your stuff first, then take the shortcuts. Like the famous Mark Twain quote "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please". As longs as you put the reps in, you learn how to model and all the good stuff down the 3D pipeline, you develop and work on your art muscles, then yeah I'd say it's fine to use such a tool when you're in a hurry.
HI Pauline,
Here's a very messy, all-over-the-place rambling from me:
It depends on how you use it and what you use it for. The tool is not bad by itself, but you can mis-use it (stabbing someone with a screwdriver is not good, but a screwdriver is not a bad tool because of that).
Nowadays, you can take a photo and get a 3D Model. One that is a Topological nightmare, but still.Someday (maybe soon), you can take a Photo of a person and get a fully Rigged Character, that you can then Animate (if you like Animation, but not Modeling and Rigging, for instance). But then, a bit later, AI will be able to do the Animation part as well. The artistic influence you put in the end result shifts further and further away from., say, starting with designing and then Sculpting a Character and so on.
Let's take a step back and look at portrait painting. When Photography came along, making a portrait became something completely different, but there are still portrait painters around. Painting is not as easy as pushing a button on your camera, as a result, the relative amount of high quality photo's is not very large.
A 3D Model, made by a talented human will (hopefully) always be better than an AI Generated Model and probably a lot of non-talented humans, will shift towards using AI. That would make 3D art made by humans more valuable and better. AI will filter out the bad seeds, just like untalented painters started taking up photography in the past.
It's all not that black and white of course. I'm just thinking aloud😉
Thank you for your input. I will continue to develop my skills, and wait for them to perfect 3d generation.
Martin's reply is absolutely excellent. My 0.02 worth is that having a human element - a human making hands-on creative decisions (beyond just writing a prompt) - will always shine through in the end result. Additionally, since I have recently encountered this issue, a human can make decisions in early phases of a model that will make things easier at later stages.
The issue I encountered was this: I was given some AI generated clothing items to retopologize in order to make them game-ready. All of the clothing items involved a great deal of deep draping, wrinkles, and folds. Even in a best case scenario this sort of thing is challenging to retopo. Because the AI doesn't take into account what makes a good game model this was far from a best case scenario.
If I were modeling these items from scratch (which is very nearly what I ended up doing anyway) I would have designed "hero" drapes/folds/wrinkles - the ones that actually break silhouette - to establish the overall feel of the garment. Anything else I would sculpt in during the multi-resolution stage and just bake into the appropriate maps.
Honestly, this was a problem that hadn't even crossed my mind before having to deal with it. I think that right now there will be a lot of people generating stuff and deciding it's "good enough". And that might be fine for a lot of things. But if one wants some really top-shelf, highly directable, optimized, creative assets there is going to be a human involved on a hands-on level at some point.
All that said, and at the most dire level (because I'm a cynic), it's possible that we are all going to go the way of the working 2D animator sooner or later.
No matter how good AI gets, the human element will always be better just because it's human. Like today, you can go and buy a table in a store that was made by some machine and ok, but when it's human made by hand, it's crafted by someone, it's like oohh so fancy, the craftsmanship adds an extra layer of depth. AI will never get to that point because it ain't human, it'll always feel synthetic. That said, I welcome the tool if it allows me to do my stuff more awesome, quicker, better, etc... but as in making a table, I can use power hammers and power saw and awesome tools, in the end I made the table, not the tools.