Awe, why I love hacker news. This game was my childhood! I played it again recently on an emulator and was astounded how much easier it was. Made it to Damian without losing a single race. That seemed impossible at age 10.
"5 years ago" - you may be right but this is also very debatable.
We've used Hunyuan 3D and while better than Trellis in most cases, it was no where near the type of quality we would and have gotten from a $500 human touch. This is within the last year. And I would very much argue that 5 years ago the $500 model would still win.
That’s a fair point. I know a few foremen who use photogrammetry religiously for site surveys and volume tracking where 'lumpy' geometry doesn't matter. It’s a huge win for that niche. But yes, 3D has been lagging behind and I'm having a really hard time guestimating when it's good enough for high quality product models.
"We've seen this with photogrammetry before" - I do not believe we have. It's progressed but even a good scan is still not close to being something you would put on a legitimate eCommerce product page.
I honestly hope you are right and that I'm full of copium. Truly. But the progression has been nowhere near as fast as code, text, image, or video generation. And as it stood 2 years ago vs now is the same conclusion - unusable slop for most use cases.
I really like this framing of 'Internal Agency.' In 3D, that lack of a 'Seed' is exactly why a model fails when you try to animate it. A human modeler understands that a joint needs extra edge loops to bend correctly. It has 'intent' for the model's future. The AI, performing a 'Statistical Harvest,' only cares that the surface looks right in a static frame. It provides the 'Illusion of Completeness' but none of the functional DNA required for a production environment.
Touché. Though if the current 'eCommerce Standard' is 'dropshipped junk that looks slightly better than a hallucination,' then I’ll happily die on the hill of being over-confident.
In no capacity do these create clean topo, textures, and uvs. If you do not believe me, use the reference image from the post and upload it to Meshy or Tripo and see what happens. Yes, slightly better than the open source Trellis, but still nearly impossible to work with and a model you would never put on any slightly serious eCommerce site.
We've tried them all. If one existed, it would save us money, speed up our pipeline, and trust me we'd be using it.
"High-quality code can be a joy to extend and build upon." I love the analogy here. It is a perfect parallel to how a good 3D model is a delight to extend. Some of the better modelers we've worked with return a model that is so incredibly lightweight, easily modifiable, and looks like the real thing that I am amazed each time.
The good thing about 3D slop vs. code slop is that it is so much easier to spot at first glance. A sloppy model immediately looks sloppy to nearly any untrained eye. But on closer look at the mesh, UVs, and texture, a trained eye is able to spot just how sloppy it truly is. Whereas with code, the untrained eye will have no idea how bad that code truly is. And as we all know now, this is creating an insane amount of security vulnerabilities in production.
After more than a decade working with 3D graphics on the web, nothing has been more fun or magical to play with than transmission, IOR, and bump/env maps (thank you Three.js and now WebGPU).
I put together this rough diamond configurator so you can try it yourself.
And you are right. That's what makes 3D tough right now. Without webgpu, there can be a big cost to adding 3D content to a site, that in many cases may not be worth it. But on the other hand, we're hoping that this is a good time to jump into this space!