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.
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)
This will need to do the same.
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.
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.
> 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.
Two entirely different companies can even have the same trademark in two different areas of business.
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
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.
It's exciting to think about everything that's going to become possible in the coming years.
Is that a thing?
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?
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
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!
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?
One of us is definitely having a hard time recognizing jokes.
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.
Plus, many are probably tired of seeing the same thing being made repeatedly that just proxys requests to chatgpt and makes them look pretty.
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.
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".
I didn't imply anything about BlenderGPT at all, I just responded to a comment. Reddit is both an advertising platform for products of all kinds, and a conversation platform for broader categories of audiences, whereas SHOW HN is like a "here's my project/product, I hope you find it interesting, and here's a chance to ask me about it". If someone posts a Show HN, it's fair assume that if people find it interesting, they'll ask how it works, because we're going to be curious, and if a person is hypothetically not prepared for that, Show HN might not be the best place to post it. I didn't say any of that was true or false regarding BlenderGPT, it was just a general remark.
I do agree that I (and most HNers) find explanations of inner workings interesting in Show HN (or anything on HN).
It's hackernews, not aliexpress
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.
So we don't get another Theranos grift if this eventually raises money from private investors?
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.
Upload an image and it outputs a 3D model.
Use a separate image generator to make a model of anything you can imagine.
Super, super cool to see -- really hyped for what this means for 3D representations!
Trellis did far worse than BlenderGPT. Particularly Trellis tends to have little to no detail with nearly black texturing in the parts that are "hardest" to imagine.
Somewhat interesting as this seems to use Trellis under the hood, but again, this did a substantially better job.
Keep up the good work, gd3kr :)
OP didn't even check the Blender licensing, why would I respect such a barbones attempt at a project? At least be honest that it's just an interface with trellis.
The site's ad copy: "BlenderGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence program that creates 3D models from text or image prompts in ~20 seconds. It lets you synthesise fully textured meshes, then import directly to Blender with a shortcut or download the source files for use in any compatible software. We think it's really good, try it out for free now."
It's very deliberately posing itself as having their own proprietary algorithm, as opposed to just a wrapper around TRELLIS, whose team did the real work. There's nothing wrong with that, but not giving any credit or mention to the trellis team is in poor taste.
What I'm more disappointed in is that BlenderGPT aka TRELLIS is still not capable of producing truly segmented 3d mesh. The generated output is simply just a blob and not capable of replacing actual 3d modelers (yet).
I've already seen so many claims of being able to generate 3D but they have fallen short of expectation (including BlenderGPT/TRELLIS). Without segmentation, mesh optimizations, there is limited use.
We are so close but because everybody is chasing investment dollars they gloss over the ugly bits and even after 20 months of watching this space there has been little progress.
The true golden chalice of 3d mesh generation is a fully segmented, optimized mesh, UV texture map/material generation and pre-rigged. It appears we are far far away from it still as many FANG/Deepmind or large game engines should be the first.
Unfortunately until then we are stuck with investor dollar grift wrappers on open source products. Not just in 3D but across all domains that AI touches.
Obvious credit should be given to the source of the core functionality of the project (e.g. "Powered by TRELLIS") and using "Blender" in the name was a bad idea.
The 2D loading indicator it showed me was even better! https://blendergptv2-jobs.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/generat... - anyone know what BlenderGPT uses for that? Might be FLUX or similar.
See: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/likelihood-confusion
I saw people doing this manually on X last Friday, using FLUX diffusion model -> Trellis -> Blender
I wouldn't even be surprised if the app itself was AI generated!
Ive been in positions to know how much words can affect.
Constructive Criticism— questioning- and unnecessary sprouting due to underlying self-issues are very different things, marcellus.
but the negativity seems pretty "requited" to me. I mean, given the tone of your comment.
Demands a google account, as if my personal info is somehow worthless.
I'd assume the reason they have auth is so they don't get botted and it absolutely bricks their servers.
Google is not requiring you to pay for an account. Even if they were, you could still complain that this is not "free without an active internet subscription", or "free without owning a device that can connect to the internet", or "free without taking up 5 minutes of my time".
After you click the button to try it...
...
I have the same thing for articles where I click on the submission title and there's a paywall. I want to know about the wall before I get there so that I'll know it's not worth the effort. Usually this is achieved by looking in the comments for an archive link so in that case I don't care about there not being a warning in the submission title because the comments allow me to enjoy the content anyway. In this case there's no need for a warning in the submission title because I go to the website and I get a neat idea, that's fine, no wall yet. There's a button to try it and that's where the warning should be that a Google account is required. Your argument is what's ridiculous.
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42407232
As an example: I recently bought a piece of software for my new Mac that I had good experience with some years ago, only to find that it's not compatible with the newer models. Upon contacting support about it, this is a known issue with a whole support article written about it. However, it wasn't mentioned anywhere on the landing page or buy pages. They're working on a beta that will warn you (still after you've already installed the software) if it's not compatible with your machine, but again... if I had known this I would not have purchased in the first place. I feel tricked, and upset. This is the same type of feeling.
It asks you to first sign up with Google. Then it lets you sign in with your gmail address.
Maybe I am too reliant on my gmail account.
Ding ding ding!
I literally have same phone number at both, so it would be easiest thing in the world to add verification for uniqueness of the phone number.
It's not like I am making tens or even thousands of accounts or doing anything nefarious with them. Just having my "official" account and "throwaway" account.
Can google ban happy ban me? Sure, if that happens, it happens. I lost access to my email before (small national provider from days before the internet was big, it just stopped working one day). But that can happen anyway, but I don't see any policy that would suggest that (at least nothing in first page of google suggest that).
Surely it infringes on Blender's (unregistered) trademark, but maybe the registration process only reviews exisiting registered marks, and it'd be up to the Blender Foundation to challenge the use of BlenderGPT. On the other hand, the USPTO trademark search didn't turn up any relevant results for BlenderGPT even though the terms of service on the site seem to indicate a US based company.
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.
$20/mo gets me 50 credits/mo, but I can buy 50 credits at any time for just $10? Sounds like the subscription is asking me to pay double for the same number of credits.
I wonder how well typical render farm could run a model like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1gk8x5j/blende...
That particular part doesn't mean much.
The name "ChatGPT" has become a new and exciting name like "Google" was in the early 2000s, so people are latching onto it for marketing purposes. The techical accuracy of a name doesn't really matter if it helps you attract new customers.
But even so, the tool could still be junk and/or a scam.
Then I created a figurine of Trump and a model of Galata Tower.
Check it out: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/395da02b-874d-441c-...
I'm very surprised by all the negativity in the comments, some kid created a tool that's working as advertised and even gives a free demo. What am I missing here? Why are so many people are acting as if this is a scam? The tool isn't asking anything more than one click sign up using Google, takes you straight to the UI where you spend your free credits instantly.
Using the trademark of a very popular 3d software, coupling it with a very popular product name from the biggest AI corp in the world.
And not mentioning it's a wrapper over a model so new that it's easy to assume this commercial product is innovative (other than the design of a UI over a service).
Even if there was nothing illegal (there is on the trademark infringement), calling it a scam would be a stretch but the author has forfeited its ethical right to be treated gently.
And as for the innovation part... Kind of irrelevant, 99% of "tech" is built on creating a UI for a process. What's Uber or AirBnB for example? A GUI over a database to keep records of a marketplace.
Just made a porcelain elephant to test it, it came out so cute!
Anyway - I can't find a good reason for someone to start 3D graphic course today. A tool like this will eat everyone's lunch.
It's a GenAI subculture signifier. Utterly tiresome; HN and the tech web is riddled with it.
Presumably, the point is to be a "written by a human" signifier
From https://www.blender.org/about/logo/
"In short – if you want to start a company or website related to Blender services, avoid using the name Blender in it. You can use it as a secondary tagline though – such as “Awesome Company Inc., the Blender specialists”. Same goes for forks of the Blender software, give it a new name and create a unique brand that way. The latter is also enforced by the GNU GPL, which explicitly excludes brand names from the freedom."
