[HN Gopher] Shap-E: Generate 3D objects conditioned on text or i...
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       Shap-E: Generate 3D objects conditioned on text or images
        
       Author : tim_sw
       Score  : 273 points
       Date   : 2023-05-06 01:07 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | qup wrote:
       | I just got a 3D printer but I'm a total noob.
       | 
       | How many more steps have to occur between these models and me
       | printing them?
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | If you check the issues, the latest one is from Jozef Prusa
         | interested in doing straight up Printables integration... so
         | not that many.
        
         | dceddia wrote:
         | I'm not sure what format it's generating these models in, but
         | if they're SDL, you should be able to drop them into a slicer
         | program (like PrusaSlicer, Cura, etc) and generate the gcode
         | there (the 3D printer movement instructions). Then load that
         | gcode into your printer (via SD card, wifi, whatever it
         | supports) and go!
         | 
         | If these aren't in SDL, but are some format Blender can open,
         | then Blender can turn them into SDL. It looks from the
         | description like it's compatible with Blender.
        
           | kuida0r3 wrote:
           | From the jupyter notebook in the repo [0], the output is in
           | .ply or polygon file format which is used by some 3D scanners
           | and can be converted to STL supported by most 3D printers.
           | 
           | 0-https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/examples/
           | s...
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | > How many more steps have to occur between these models and me
         | printing them?
         | 
         | Shouldn't be too hard. Based on the code of the examples it
         | seems it can output polygonal meshes in ply format. Either your
         | slicer natively supports that, or you can use something (for
         | example blender) to convert the ply to a format your slicer
         | supports.
         | 
         | What can go wrong if the model "looks okay" but have some
         | subtle geometric issue (like if it has a missing face, which
         | makes it non-manifold or non-watertight) Nowadays many slicers
         | have tools to heal such problems, but there can be dragons that
         | way.
         | 
         | I looked for an example object in their repo and found this
         | one:
         | https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/examples/e...
         | 
         | If that is representative it is a very nice clean geometry. I
         | have sliced it with prusa slicer no problem and I could be
         | printing it within a minute of downloading it if I would need a
         | 3d printed cactus in my life.
         | 
         | > I just got a 3D printer but I'm a total noob.
         | 
         | How noob you mean? If this would be literally your first print
         | I would recommend printing first a sample file which came with
         | your printer. (just to make sure everything is okay with the
         | printer itself) But as a second print you can totally try to
         | print one of these of course. Just don't give up the hobby if
         | something goes wrong :) Something always goes wrong.
        
           | qup wrote:
           | > How noob you mean?
           | 
           | I successfully printed a hollow cube yesterday, my first ever
           | print, and failed on about 6 attempts at a "mario ring" file.
           | It's PETG and I'm just fiddling with settings, getting a lot
           | of stringing etc.
           | 
           | Anyway, very new, but I'm prepared for the learning curve.
           | I'm a good debugger, and I don't give up easily, so hopefully
           | that'll carry through to the printing.
        
             | filoleg wrote:
             | I got into 3D printing from zero knowledge a couple of
             | months ago, and i found PETG an absolute nightmare to deal
             | with compared to PLA.
             | 
             | Mind you, i only bought filament from Prusa and
             | AtomicFilament, two very respectable manufacturers. Had
             | zero issues with their PLA, and it looked beautiful. With
             | PETG, no matter how much i tried adjusting live-z levels or
             | playing in PrusaSlicer with print speed levels,
             | temperature, layer height, etc., it all would mess up at
             | some point. Out of 5 prints of the same object, I finally
             | managed to get one great print out of PETG. But when I
             | tried printing another one, I would start having various
             | issues again and would have to adjust things again in hopes
             | of eventually getting it right. I just went back to PLA and
             | had zero issues at all since then.
             | 
             | Even though I am aware of PLA disadvantages compared to
             | PETG, I simply realized that for my purposes, they didn't
             | matter nearly as much as consistency and ease of good
             | prints.
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | I don't want to deny your experience but I want to
               | provide a counterpoint. I actually find PETG easier and
               | more reliable to print with than PLA, aside from a little
               | bit more stringing. It's especially good for large
               | objects because the warping is very minimal, and it has
               | more strength and flexibility than PLA, and better inter-
               | layer bonding strength, so I don't have to worry as much
               | about brittle failures or print orientation. I use a
               | Prusa MK3S+, with Prusa's textured sheet. After setting
               | the first-layer Z height properly and cleaning the bed
               | with an alcohol pad, it works flawlessly basically every
               | time. I've used both Prusa's PETG and 3rd party filaments
               | with equal success.
               | 
               | After many years of falling out of love with 3D printing,
               | PETG helped me fall back in love with it.
        
               | krisoft wrote:
               | > I don't want to deny your experience but I want to
               | provide a counterpoint.
               | 
               | I heard that PETG is more sensitive to humidity from the
               | air than PLA. So maybe that is the difference? Maybe you
               | live in a dryer climate and the person you are responding
               | to has more moisture in the air?
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | It's a reasonable thought, but I live in the pacific
               | northwest, which is one of the wettest climates in North
               | America... it's possible, though.
        
               | qup wrote:
               | I'll check out PLA if I can't get PETG going properly. I
               | also have some TPU to play with, but haven't yet.
               | 
               | Thanks!
               | 
               | I'm also going to re-run the cube to see if the same
               | settings work a second time, prompted by your comment.
               | I've really only had failures with the one model.
        
             | wkat4242 wrote:
             | Like the others said, forget about petg until you know what
             | you're doing. Just use PLA :)
        
             | ehsankia wrote:
             | I'm also pretty new, and in my experience, when it gets
             | tricky is support. Quality models for 3d printers are made
             | to print without supports, but a lot of these normal models
             | have a lot of weird details and geometries that require
             | supports. And then you gotta fiddle with a bunch of
             | settings to find the right parameters for it.
        
       | chaxor wrote:
       | Seems extremely similar to the Point-e work done a few months
       | ago. I would imagine that just doing Veitoris Rips on the point-e
       | would get close to this solution as well, although that would be
       | a bit too logic based for the ML world we live in now.
        
         | jahewson wrote:
         | That would get you a mesh but not a NeRF.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | personjerry wrote:
       | Every time I click Samples.md and then click back, GitHub tells
       | me "Access to this site has been restricted." and times me out
       | for a while. Anybody have the same thing or know why?
        
         | knobhandle wrote:
         | Had the same issue. On other browser I was able to browse the
         | site. Just clear recent history and cookies.
        
       | jamilton wrote:
       | The models seem charmingly low-poly from the gifs.
        
       | krisoft wrote:
       | Tangentially related: A hobby I found immensely rewarding as of
       | late is to ask a generative model to draw something pretty and
       | then try to make the object in real life.
       | 
       | I have previously asked dall-e to draw me steampunk watch-like
       | gizmos, selected the prettiest and then I went and carved it out
       | of wax. And right now I'm 3d modelling a copper owl jewellery
       | design dreamed up by Midjourney.
       | 
       | It is a really exciting exercise because it makes me think about
       | what do I like about the image, what is the "essence of it". It
       | is also stretches my maker muscles because when I design things
       | for myself from scratch I always keep in mind the constraints of
       | my tools and techniques. But of course the AI has no such
       | compunctions. It just draws something pretty, manufacturability
       | be damned.
        
         | vertis wrote:
         | I've found it very rewarding as a source of fantastical ideas.
         | I like that generating items in mid-journey can break me out of
         | one line of thinking even if that's because it's result is
         | absurd.
        
         | matlo wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | 190 GBP for a spoon. It reminds me of a certain expression,
           | something about fools and money...
        
             | dkural wrote:
             | Eating is important. Life, is all about eating, and life
             | gave rise to intelligence. /que dramatic music.
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | You should mention that this is your project by the way.
           | You're pretending like it's not by writing they instead of
           | we, while on your own website you state that you're co-
           | founder of oio.
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | please share!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | cl42 wrote:
       | I've been playing with this a bit. Sharing some examples that
       | aren't from their repo, in case people are curious.
       | 
       | Simple objects are surprisingly good. Examples of a viking helmet
       | below:
       | 
       | -- https://phasellm.com/static/img/helmet-01.png
       | 
       | -- https://phasellm.com/static/img/helmet-02.png
       | 
       | More complex objects, e.g., "a viking" are harder though you can
       | clearly see what the model is trying to do (cape, sword, person,
       | etc.)...
       | 
       | -- https://phasellm.com/static/img/viking-01.png
       | 
       | Maybe more iterations of the model could work. I'm sure it's only
       | a matter of time before this gets much better, more details, etc.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Wouldn't a more promising approach be to go through NeRFs
         | first? So first figure out what you want the model to look like
         | from various angles, and then try to make a textured 3d model
         | out of it.
        
       | georyb wrote:
       | I'm curios how much more difficult is generative 3D?
       | 
       | We are barely able to generate 2D 1080p images, without artefacts
       | using diffusion methods. How much more complex is the jump to
       | production grade 3D?
       | 
       | As someone creating re-usable 3D product models on Polymock @
       | https://polymock.com the bigest issue for me, is that you want
       | your models to be editable. 3D modellers want to post-process and
       | add tweaks to existing 3D models. Current AI generators lack this
       | layering structures.
       | 
       | What I actually want, is a 3D generator for textures / materials.
       | It should be a much simpler task for current AI.
       | 
       | At the moment, the state of 3D generators is slowly ripening for
       | indie game developers. I'm sure that in the near future, the
       | models will be high-enough quality to generate a basic character
       | set.
       | 
       | Others have mentioned it, but I think NVIDIA has an edge in 3D
       | synthesis & rendering. OpenAI is arguable the leader in consumer
       | text-transformers - I wonder the goal for releasing this POC (I
       | don't think they will allocate any serious resource here)
        
         | placeholder_0 wrote:
         | Have you tried texturelab.xyz?
        
         | prox wrote:
         | Someone made a SD/blender hybrid add-on where texturing will be
         | based on a prompt.
        
       | bemmu wrote:
       | HuggingFace space: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hysts/Shap-E
        
         | newswasboring wrote:
         | Did it get hugged to death? I only see a runtime error.
        
       | babuloseo wrote:
       | TIL what a Ube ice cream cone is
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | it's popular in the Philippines and it's an impressive purple
         | color. Taro and pandan are good in desserts too.
         | 
         | And then there's durian.
        
           | uhhyeahdude wrote:
           | Ube has been an increasingly trendy/popular flavor for all
           | sorts of dessert food in America; this is perhaps most
           | evident if you visit Hawaii, but it can also be found in
           | pretty much any bubble tea shop as a flavor option.
           | ubaehawaii makes an ube crinkle cookie that is as delicious
           | as it is purple. I'm not affiliated or anything, just a fan
           | of good cookies (and ube!)
        
       | alexmolas wrote:
       | Finally some open AI from OpenAI
        
         | juunpp wrote:
         | Is it? The code in the repository is MIT, but the models are
         | downloaded from Azure:
         | 
         | https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/models/dow...
         | 
         | The code license in such cases would not extend to binary blobs
         | downloaded from the Internet. And the code is basically useless
         | without the blob.
        
           | newswasboring wrote:
           | I can't figure it out, what's the license on the blob?
        
             | juunpp wrote:
             | Not a lawyer, but at least for code, no license means you
             | have no rights to that code, even if it's just one download
             | way:
             | 
             | https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-
             | can...
             | 
             | I don't know if the same is true of blobs, and I also
             | haven't checked whether the blobs are licensed anywhere on
             | their site.
        
           | pabs3 wrote:
           | It definitely wouldn't pass Debian's machine learning policy:
           | 
           | https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/
           | https://deepdive.opensource.org/podcast/why-debian-wont-
           | dist...
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | OpenAi also released Whisper in September. They do open stuff
         | once in a while.
        
           | nwoli wrote:
           | Seems like they're doing the bare minimum for their name not
           | to be embarrassing
        
       | startupsfail wrote:
       | There was something like that, but seemingly (comparing demo
       | videos) much higher quality released a few months ago from NVIDIA
       | - https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/magic3d/
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | The colors on those are strange and unpleasant. I wonder if
         | they forgot something basic like gamma correction.
        
         | Racing0461 wrote:
         | maybe thats why they released at on github instead of adding it
         | as a feature on openai.com, it sucks.
        
           | orliesaurus wrote:
           | I actually thought this initially, but I also believe that
           | given the nature of where we are going (in the 3d space at
           | least) it makes sense to open source something that isn't
           | commercially resellable (thinking all the people who just
           | repackage openai APIs) and let the community iterate over it
           | and make it better perhaps?
        
         | ehsankia wrote:
         | I don't understand, if you have a 3d model, why do these gifs
         | need to be so low res and aliased? The AI isn't generated gifs,
         | why can't they properly render the previews in higher quality?
         | The magic3d models don't look that much more detailed, they're
         | just rendered properly...
        
           | mysterydip wrote:
           | perhaps to hide imperfections/rough edges and make it look
           | nicer than it is?
        
       | marviel wrote:
       | https://github.com/openai/shap-e/blob/main/shap_e/examples/s...
       | 
       | ^ Single file Jupyter Notebook for Text Into:
       | 
       | (1) Gif (derived from NERFs I suppose)
       | 
       | (2) .PLY
        
       | joeld42 wrote:
       | Tip: If you're loading these .glbs in blender, add an "Attribute"
       | node in the shader editor, put "Col" in the name field, and
       | connect "Color" to "Base Color" in the material to see the
       | colors.
        
       | EamonnMR wrote:
       | The next super Scribblenauts game is going to be wild.
        
       | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-06 23:02 UTC)