[HN Gopher] Show HN: GPT image editing, but for 3D models
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Show HN: GPT image editing, but for 3D models
Hey HN! I'm Zach one of the co-founders of Adam
(https://www.adamcad.com). We're building AI-powered tools for CAD
and 3D modeling [1]. We've recently been exploring a new way to
bring GPT-style image editing directly into 3D model generation and
are excited to showcase this in our web-app today. We're calling it
creative mode and are intrigued by the fun use cases this could
create by making 3D generation more conversational! For example
you can put a prompt in such as "an elephant" then follow it up by
"have it ride a skateboard" and it preserves the context, identity
and maintains consistency with the previous model. We believe this
lends itself better to an iterative design process when prototyping
creative 3D assets or models for printing. We're offering everyone
10 free generations to start (ramping up soon!). Here's a short
video explaining how it works:
https://www.loom.com/share/cf9ab91375374a4f93d6cc89619a043b We'd
also love you to try our parametric mode (free!) which uses LLMs to
create a conversational interface for solid modeling as touched on
in a recent HN thread [2]. We are leveraging the code generation
capabilities of these models to generate OpenSCAD code (an open-
source script based CAD) and are surfacing the variables as sliders
the user can toggle to adjust their design. We hope this can give a
glimpse into what it could be like to "vibe-CAD". We will soon be
releasing our results on Will Patrick's Text to CAD eval [3] and
adding B-rep compatible export! We'd love to hear what you think
and where we should take this next :)
[1]https://x.com/zachdive/status/1882858765613228287
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774990
[3]https://willpatrick.xyz/technology/2025/04/23/teaching-llms-...
Author : zachdive
Score : 91 points
Date : 2025-06-04 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.adamcad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.adamcad.com)
| dekuma wrote:
| will you expose an API/export beyond STL so teams can slot this
| into existing pipelines? Excited to see creative-mode evolve.
| zachdive wrote:
| If enough people want it we will build it! For the parametric
| text-to-CAD generation we will have an API in the future and
| are actively exploring STEP export
| gavmor wrote:
| Have you put any thought into accommodating self-supporting
| design to optimize for printing?
|
| Or parametric structural optimization / topology optimization
| with parametric constraints?
|
| Or, rather, if these are out of scope for your tool, then I'm
| wondering, like the other comment, how you'll slot into existing
| pipelines that _do_ facilitate these techniques.
|
| I'm not in the industry, I'm just curious.
| zachdive wrote:
| Great question and I don't think it's necessarily out of scope.
| Our goal for the web app product is to make the single best
| design tool for 3D printing! Right now, we don't directly
| optimize for printability (like overhang minimization or
| support-free constraints), but it's 100% something we've been
| thinking about. Eventually we could guide the model generation
| with real-time manufacturability feedback/constraints but tbd
| on how we'll surface this
| moralestapia wrote:
| This is really good, congrats on shipping!
|
| Can you upload an existing model and start working from there?
| ForzaAaRon wrote:
| It's in the backlog of the list of things we wanna do for sure.
| Would that be something you wanna try?
| HetengAaronLi wrote:
| also fyi we can do image upload to 3d!
| liesandxander wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Can you please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and stick to the rules
| when posting here? You broke both those sets of guidelines
| here.
|
| Also, while I have you, could you please stop creating accounts
| for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that.
| This is also in the site guidelines.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a
| community, users need some identity for other users to relate
| to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
| community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
| Barbing wrote:
| (not GP) Thanks, very insightful and pleased to see 9y of
| consistency :)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Having trouble trying to get a regular truncated tetrahedron.
| Maybe too .. obtuse? (Ha ha.)
| avipeltz wrote:
| thats one that would be better for parametric mode. But
| parametric mode is definitely still in Beta so it might take a
| couple tries, but i was able to get it to generating a regular
| truncated tetrahedron after a couple prompts
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Cool. (Share the prompt if you could?)
| avipeltz wrote:
| i just said "regular truncated tetrahedron", with the
| toggle switch to Parametric, wish i could drop a screenshot
| here
| HetengAaronLi wrote:
| checking in. any luck with parametric mode?
| hoakiet98 wrote:
| This is super interesting! Cursor CEO mentioned in interviews
| that they initially started with building AI for 3D models, but
| pivoted because they couldn't get enough data for the models to
| be effective.
|
| I wonder if you think this is still true given how much better
| the foundation models are now.
| zachdive wrote:
| yes i saw that! imho the latest foundation models have enabled
| a whole host of new possibilities. particularly improvements on
| SWE-BENCH and other software related benchmarks seem to
| translate fairly well to openSCAD as we're generating code.
| however there is still a lot of work to do, as these models
| struggle to reason spatially. gemini 2.5 is probably the best
| here rn.
|
| the future of cad generation will undoubtedly extend far beyond
| simple code-gen to generating human-readable features. this is
| where the data will be important!
| adenta wrote:
| I've had some success with openSCAD and this MCP, feel free to
| ping if that's helpful context
|
| https://github.com/jhacksman/OpenSCAD-MCP-Server
| avipeltz wrote:
| definitely :)
| avipeltz wrote:
| have you tried cadquery or build123d?
| adenta wrote:
| nope, should I? Or should I try your thing?
|
| To me "parametric" features seem like a nice to have vs a
| hard requirement. I just want to be able to talk at my
| computer and get back an STL to spec that I can print out
| avipeltz wrote:
| then our product is probs better, build123d and cadquery
| are more useful if you need the output format to be a
| STEP file or something in a BREP format. For 3d printing
| applications thats not really necessary because your are
| exporting to a mesh format to print it anyway
| zachdive wrote:
| try our thing and use the "creative mode" then! let us
| know what you think
| klaussilveira wrote:
| One thing no 3D AI tool has ever done is to focus on the concept
| of enhancing or restyling the textures of existing, UV-unwrapped
| 3D models. I had to build my own pipeline on ComfyUI and Blender
| scripts, exporting ID maps and black/white masks from the model
| UV, in order to get a Stable Diffusion to paint within the
| boundaries of the UV and consider it as means of painting. Using
| cavity maps also helped with the model create boundaries. But now
| I am able to quickly apply, let's say, comic-book style art into
| existing textures of existing models.
|
| Have you considered providing built-in tools for mesh decimation
| and UV unwrapping? I know it can be quickly done with meshlab,
| but I imagine not a lot of Adam users would even understand the
| need for decimation. Any possibility for also automating rigging?
| zachdive wrote:
| yeah you're pretty much bang on. we haven't exposed mesh
| decimation and more functionality mostly because a lot of Adam
| users are newer to 3d but that can change! the question is how
| to surface those kinds of features in a more user-friendly way.
|
| we were thinking of rigging for the creative mode. we want to
| create more fun ways for our users to share their generations
| and animations could be a step towards that. would you be
| interested in that feature?
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Oh, I don't think you guys should even expose it other than
| in the export feature. "Export Optimized" or "Export for Game
| Engines".
|
| I think Mixamo nailed the autorigging years ago. Anything
| similar to that is good enough. If you guys want to go fancy,
| check out Cascadeur and what they are doing. For a cool
| skinning algo, you might want to check voxel heat difusing:
|
| https://github.com/meshonline/Surface-Heat-Diffuse-Skinning
|
| What about painting/iterating on the model, while respecting
| the UV constraints and boundaries of the original texture, is
| that on the roadmap?
| zachdive wrote:
| will check out the skinning thanks! right now all
| iterations are done through prompts to make it feel as
| conversational as possible. some forms of in-painting could
| be cool though.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Computer: tea, earl gray, hot
| zachdive wrote:
| i'd like to think we're building a real life replicator.
| printing the generations on our bambu defo feels that way
| sometimes :)
| bko wrote:
| This is great. I like the pattern of integrating LLMs into
| specific applications. Is there something similar to figma?
|
| There are a lot of tools to convert figma into code, but is there
| a reverse? Say you have code already and you neglected figma. Any
| way to create the figma and iterate on it through an LLM?
| zachdive wrote:
| i believe i've seen a figma mcp posted on a HN recently! have
| you tried any specific tools?
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| Feature request: since it's using OpenSCAD under the hook, it
| would be great to be able to download the .scad file
|
| The "creative" mode seems to be ok, but my main interest (the
| parametric) failed in my first test: generate a bottle.
|
| But anyway, good job!
| zachdive wrote:
| would you be interested in us also exposing the underlying code
| or just being able to download the .scad file?
|
| also would love to know what your use case is and why you are
| more interested in parametric vs creative!
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| Hi, thanks for answering!
|
| Only the generated .scad would be great! I mean, I see to use
| cases for that that would be helpful for me:
|
| 1. Asking for a base model, download it as .scad and them
| improve it through OpenSCAD accordingly to my needs
|
| 2. Starting modeling in OpenSCAD, them ask the AI for some
| boring task (e.g. generate honeycomb patterns, hooks, hinges,
| and so on)
|
| > also would love to know what your use case is and why you
| are more interested in parametric
|
| Most of my use cases of 3D printing is for tools, household
| utilities, spare parts, etc. Because of that, my favorite
| tool is OpenSCAD, and I use it a lot.
|
| But I reckon that it is sometimes really boring. Sometimes I
| need to spend a lot of time with trigonometry and other math
| tricks and less with modeling itself. For example, the
| aforementioned honeycomb patterns, I've spent some hours of
| my life playing with sines, cosines, apothems, etc while I
| think that it would be a job that an AI could do for me.
| zachdive wrote:
| ok thanks for the feedback and consider it done! we'll add
| .scad for export!
|
| you can also use creative mode for functional single part
| objects. i've made cool cupholders, plant pots and desk
| ornaments with it
| avipeltz wrote:
| The parametric editor take a few iterations to get to what you
| want, but heres an example of generating a simple bottle:
| https://app.adamcad.com/share/9e9412fb-2741-4513-ac2d-1f4e73...
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| nice!
| arberavdullahu wrote:
| Very cool! This reminds me of a use case I explored a few years
| ago--customizing furniture with different fabrics, wood finishes,
| and design options. In physical showrooms, furniture stores can
| usually only display a single version of each piece, but
| customers often want to visualize how the same item would look in
| various configurations. That's where a digital tool could really
| shine.
|
| One concept I explored was creating an interactive app where
| users can experiment with different material options--essentially
| a real-time configurator. There's a great example here [1], where
| if you model an object as a .obj file (possibly similar to Adam's
| parametric models), you can tweak its materials and colors
| dynamically. IKEA seems to have something similar in production
| for some of their products [2].
|
| I experimented with Adam as well, and it did a surprisingly good
| job. The only catch: if you try to iterate too much, it tends to
| alter the form of the object. My ideal version of this would
| involve a professional photographer capturing high-resolution
| images of, say, a couch. Then I'd upload them into Adam, generate
| realistic renders with different fabrics or finishes, and
| download the final variants as high-quality images to use in
| catalogs or ecommerce.
|
| [1] https://angon.me/experiments/6/
|
| [2] https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/ektorp-2-seat-sofa-hakebo-
| grey-...
|
| [3] https://app.adamcad.com/share/2f1e68ad-2cdd-4613-8fdc-
| fc33f2...
| zachdive wrote:
| super interesting! thanks for sharing your generations :)
|
| in that case wouldn't you bypass the 3d aspect altogether?
| TheonlyJem wrote:
| I think I saw a video of this on YouTube a while back, of them
| building this. Looks promising
| zachdive wrote:
| haha really which one?
| b0a04gl wrote:
| super curious,how are you handling constraint resolution under
| the hood when user modifies via prompt vs direct manipulation?
| are you maintaining a shared parametric model or diffing against
| a scene graph? also how's geometry validation handled postgen to
| avoid non-manifold trash?
| zachdive wrote:
| For "parametric" everything ultimately updates the OpenSCAD
| code behind the scenes. Prompt edits and sliders both just
| modify the same parameters in that script, which we recompile
| into a new model.
|
| For "creative" its a little different.
| flippyhead wrote:
| I'm excited to try this with my 11-year old. We love 3d printing
| stuff, but have been mostly limiting ourselves to existing works
| on printables. I curious how well the output here works in our
| prusa.
| zachdive wrote:
| i've used creative mode with my little brother and he loves it
| to print figurines!
| HetengAaronLi wrote:
| I have a Bambu and the new creative mode has been super fun for
| desiging fun prints!
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/fU3H5kxGJWfM3rxi9
| ata_aman wrote:
| Somewhat related, but I'd love GPT enabled multi-physics
| simulations on objects. Designing in CAD, especially for
| intricate objects seems (currently) to be better when done by
| "hand", but I'd absolutely love to use speech-to-text to run
| different simulations on said objects.
| zachdive wrote:
| i'm not convinced that speech is the best interface but neither
| is text. we will most likely converge towards a mix of text
| (ai) commands and gui (point-and-click)
|
| could you give me an example?
| ata_aman wrote:
| Yeah, here's one[0]. Obviously long ways out but using speech
| to run through scenarios of different simulations from pre-
| defined parameters would be great. You're basically applying
| formulas to already designed objects. If the model could run
| the scenario and spit out a report when it's done with
| summaries, it would be great since some of these simulations
| take hours. Then adjust the model for better sim results and
| iterate accordingly.
|
| [0] https://doc.comsol.com/5.4/doc/com.comsol.help.heat/Intro
| duc...
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