Contrary to the downvotes on the above comment I see absolutely zero issue with wanting to be informed of this in advance. I would've made this exact same comment if I had run into it myself.
It clearly says "Sign up with Google" before you're prompted with anything. Saying it on the landing page itself as an asterisk next to "free" would just feel stupid, like those overly cautious warning labels, and if anything make me think less of the service.
So where do you draw the line? Maybe it even needs to be included in the post submission title? It's just ridiculous. Anyone thinking this is a problem needs to get their priorities straight.
> So where do you draw the line? Maybe it even needs to be included in the post submission title? It's just ridiculous. Anyone thinking this is a problem needs to get their priorities straight.
...
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.
Once I click the button I've already decided. If I am surprised by something after I click that would have impacted my decision to click it in the first place, I get very upset for being tricked like that.
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.
The page wants access to your name, email, language settings and profile picture. Language setting and profile picture aside, you would need to surrender that information anyway for billing purposes.
The usage of "free" is almost always used when referring to something that can be obtained/used without exchanging money.
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".
It's like saying an apple someone gives you is not "free" but "free with the condition of using your muscles to pick up the apple". While technically true it's not something anyone would reasonably expect to be labeled that way.
It should read "free with google account, electricity, computer and/or all other equipment needed to interface with a website, and last but not least, the user's time."
Just make a new Google account. It's not like you have to fill correct info and you can make two accounts with same phone number (at least I could ~1 year ago).
I appreciate you sharing this. However are you not concerned that Google might flag your accounts as being somehow fraudulent? And then get locked out of your digital identity?
Not really. They have official help topic as well as UI to switch accounts: Sign in to multiple accounts at once.
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).
For the vast majority of sites with Google login it is indeed worthless. I implement it because I want to give people an easy login option and because customers want it. I couldn't care less about your personal info.
IMHO this unjustified negativity, it's asking you to sign with your Google account which gives them very basic info about you which is very reasonable considering that they are going to give you a computationally intensive demo. It's a common practice against abuse, it's not asking you to install a tracking software or anything.
Other than the fear of randomly losing it with no recourse, I'm using this account for more than 20 years now and I'm fine had no issues. Definitely not malware.
I know exactly what it's for and if you read all my comments before you mindlessly try to bring someone down, my complaint isn't with needing an account, it's saying you can use this for "free" unqualified. Not even "free with account". It's "free with and only with a google account".
You're welcome to make a throwaway gmail account if you want "truly free". And don't try to argue that your time still has value, because then that means nothing is truly free.
I tried three images as the prompt, all three isolated without a background, and it worked pretty decently. Nothing I would actually use, but they generated something close enough.
The signifier is to sound and write like Sam Altman, I think. It's perfectly possible to write in a style that doesn't sound like ChatGPT, which has the tone of a collection of college admissions essays written by perky, shallow people with no life experience.
That’s pretty slick. I wonder if this sort of thing, generating a 3D model, could be a better way toward persistent worlds, than the models trained on games.
I wonder how well typical render farm could run a model like this.
I’d hazard a guess that this is using the Microsoft Trellis [0] open source project released last week. You can download the weights and the code right now, just need an Nvidia GPU with at least 16GB vram.
I saw people doing this manually on X last Friday, using FLUX diffusion model -> Trellis -> Blender
I thought the exact same thing, especially considering how bare bones the site/app is. It's as if someone rushed to turn that into a subscription-based app as quickly as possible.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the app itself was AI generated!
Yeah I figure it's that too. When you look at the miniature generated before the actual 3D model, it looks like something generated with another tool which is fed to the 3D generation AI.
"I am quite suspicious of this project. In particular I want to draw attention to the nonsensical naming scheme (this is clearly not related to anything to do with GPT) suggestive of lack of understanding of the relevant technology, an absence of a usable demo, and the fact that they show the same small handful of models over and over again. The input images do not appear natural at all - almost as though he’s just taken the 3d models he’s supposed to be „generating“ and rendered them in Blender. The quality of the models and the resulting PBR textures are extremely high, with no noticeable imperfections whatsoever. This is not impossible… but all of these things combined lead me to be very sceptical of this service. I will believe it when I see it!"
> In particular I want to draw attention to the nonsensical naming scheme (this is clearly not related to anything to do with GPT)
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.
I just tried it, there's a demo and works as advertised. I had 3 credits upon signing up, tried uploading a photo of a cup and it created the model of the cup.
Then I created a figurine of Trump and a model of Galata Tower.
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.
It's a product that works as advertised and has a name that describes exactly what it does. OpenAI was denied the right to register GPT as a trademark anyway, for Blender, yeah maybe but that's up to Blender to defend. It's not pretending to be the Blender software but a tool for it, so it's not causing a confusion.
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.
Hey HN! I'm aarya (twitter.com/gd3kr) and I built BlenderGPT
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.
Sorry to sound like a party pooper but this project gives off strong “fake it till you make it” vibes. Most AI projects I’ve seen share some type of information on how they work, yet this is completely devoid of it. Is this a new approach to mesh generation or is it using existing tooling? Then you’ve got the “we think it’s really good” line when it’s really just you. Like, why the hand waviness, the use of “GPT” when it doesn’t apply. There’s just something a bit off about this. Maybe it’s all fine but the the lack of information doesn’t help.
> Like, why the hand waviness, the use of “GPT” when it doesn’t apply.
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.
Understandable. For context, the GPT in the name comes from an earlier version of this project (https://github.com/gd3kr/blendergpt) which actually used GPT-4 to write python scripts that Blender would then execute. This would allow GPT-4 to program operations like instantiating primitives with the Blender Python API given only a text prompt (ex. "create 50 cubes")
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.
The backwards drivetrain/steering is kind of fascinating to consider. I'd love to see someone like Colin Furze or Stuff Made Here actually make one to try it out. What would it be like to ride a bike that steered by pivoting the back wheel?
Would be interesting videos. Makes me think of how you have to maneuver a shopping cart if pushing backwards; as the rear wheels are fixed and front wheels rotate. At high speed it would be dicey, too easy to oversteer
why does it matter how it works? Either it works and people pay for it or it doesn't. Does every company owe you, the end user, an explanation on how their product works? While you're at it, maybe you can get all the secret recipes.
Well, because we're curious and this is a place where curious critical technology enthusiasts gravitate. If it doesn't do anything novel _at_all_ or if there's no story to elaborate on, go to Reddit.
Plus, many are probably tired of seeing the same thing being made repeatedly that just proxys requests to chatgpt and makes them look pretty.
I'm curious: don't you think the aggregate interest of the HN crowd is adequately measured via the voting mechanism? You seem not to find BlenderGPT as presented in its current form uninteresting, but if you accept that (voting up)=interest, many other people did. Why dismiss("go to Reddit" comment) someone else's work, that, evidently, many other HNers find interesting?
I didn't dismiss anyone's work, and I do find the upvote system to, at least in some cases, adequately represent the level interest on hn.
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.
Sure, HNers are interested in explanations of how things work (I am too!).
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".
> But you specifically said that without such an explanation, products should "go to Reddit" (which presumably means, they don't belong on HN)
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.
Do you believe this was the nature of the thread? Seems appropriate to say you agree with me that Show HN is ideal for those who'd like to engage in some curious discussion about whatever it is they're posting, but without regard to whether or not that's a requirement.
The reason I engaged in the thread is I didn't want OP to feel like their posting/their work was unappreciated. Putting myself in their shoes, I especially guessed that the "go to Reddit" comment would have felt dismissive.
I do agree that I (and most HNers) find explanations of inner workings interesting in Show HN (or anything on HN).
I also don't feel like people should be treated dismissively, but I think the GP in this subthread did qualify their initial impression enough, since OP did respond to them. It seemed to me like the person I responded to, a few replies deep, felt as though it was somehow overstepping to ask how something worked, and it was that take I was responding to, nothing backhanded toward OP, especially because they already established themselves to be as forthcoming as one might expect.
I think that's a fair point that not every company owes the end user a recipe for how to reproduce their product.
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.
Cool tool, the models I created were a bit crude though. Is there a way to increase details? Is prompting affecting it? For example in image generation adding keywords like "photorealistic, octane, HD" helps. Is this the case in this tool too?
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?
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.
You may need to rename it, though, as this is not an official Blender project. [1]
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)
Yeah, Blender have been getting serious about enforcing their trademark recently. BlenderMarket have said that Blender asked them to rename, and they’ve been around for years, contribute to Blender fund, etc.
I know it won't hit the same if you change its name, but like the others here, I really would recommend that you come up with some new product name. Additionally, the glyph you're looking for is ™, not ®, if you're not registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
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.
You can use ® for registration in other countries/regions too. In UK/EU it's not registered until the end of the opposition period.
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.
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?
I want something a little related to this. I want a little auto assist tool in Blender so I can hit a keyboard shortcut, circle something, and say "extrude a square right around this area" or "close this mesh" or "make this shell a solid object." Stuff that an experienced Blender artist knows exactly how to do but might require some thinking. In other words, coding auto-assist for Blender user. Bonus points if it shows the steps.
Gosh-- that might be as impolite as taking people's work without notifying or compensating them to directly compete against them in a global marketplace making chintzy simulacra. But gee whiz look at the tech!
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.
"Unregistered"? Blender is a registered trademark in both the US and the EU. Their brand guideline page explicitly calls out that you are not allowed to use their name in your own product: https://www.blender.org/about/logo/#trademark
Oh, huh. I assumed it was not registered since Blender uses "™" instead of "®" at the top of its homepage. I guess that's just for the logo then, not the wordmark.
Amusingly, you don't have to use either for it to be a registered trademark, it just makes it "more obvious". It also makes word marks look like corporate capitalist nonsense, so leaving it off does all of us a service =D
They aren’t software, Blender foundation likely has exclusive use in that domain. I’m guessing if it was litigated it would come up, but that they’d prevail.
And this is not even just about software in a general sense, it's literally software that creates the same product: 3d models. Absolutely asking for trouble.
The fact that the trademark doesn't merely describe the product is what allows for protection. That's why Apple can be trademarked for a computer product but not for a fruit, as the latter would be merely a description of the product.
It does interface with blender. However, Garmen can't call their watches "Apple Watches" just because they can interface with Apple products. And they certainly can't claim Apple Watch as their registered trademark like OP ("BlenderGPT®").
Yeah but a finished textured model is quite different from a low-poly untextured model even though the llama meshgen approach is quite interesting and promising.
Trellis is very impressive (topology notwithstanding). I put some examples together of what Trellis can do, it's definitely better with angular type models (vehicles, etc.), but unsurprisingly can struggle a bit with more organic forms.
I took a masked image of a tank from a game, in a perspective format, presumably the best case for these models.
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.
Ya trellis i think is the current best, i'd imagine what the OPS site is doing is a txt2img+rembg into trellis or another model, and then converted to a blender format... its a nice workflow, though he says he downgraded to a less intense model to save compute right now... which is pretty obvious, it should mention somewhere which model it is currently using
To everyone in this thread criticizing their project, what have you built and shared recently? Have you contributed anything to HN lately besides negativity?
"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."
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadDemands 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.
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.
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".
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).
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
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.
I wonder how well typical render farm could run a model like this.
I saw people doing this manually on X last Friday, using FLUX diffusion model -> Trellis -> Blender
[0] https://trellis3d.github.io/
I wouldn't even be surprised if the app itself was AI generated!
but the negativity seems pretty "requited" to me. I mean, given the tone of your comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So we don't get another Theranos grift if this eventually raises money from private investors?
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.
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?
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!
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.
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)
[1] https://www.blender.org/about/logo/#trademark
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.
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
Is that a thing?
One of us is definitely having a hard time recognizing jokes.
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.
See: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/likelihood-confusion
Upload an image and it outputs a 3D model.
Use a separate image generator to make a model of anything you can imagine.
https://imgur.com/a/trellis-2d-3d-samples-eSWJhMj
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.
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."