MeshAnything – Converts 3D representations into efficient 3D meshes

[modeless]

Nice looking results, hopefully not too cherry-picked. Every 3D model generation paper posted on HN has people complaining that the meshes are bad, so this kind of research is welcome and necessary for generated 3D assets to be used in actual games.

Weird custom non-commercial license unfortunately. Notes from the GitHub readme:

> It takes about 7GB and 30s to generate a mesh on an A6000 GPU

> trained on meshes with fewer than 800 faces and cannot generate meshes with more than 800 faces

[p_l]

Honestly I like the faces limitation - use it as input for blender to further develop the model, not as final product.

[jgord]

Certainly a lot of scope for this kind of thing .. people who do lidar scans or photogrammetry of buildings tend to end up with very large meshes or very large point clouds.. which means they need souped up PCs and expensive software to wrangle into some usable CAD format.

Its an area where things can be improved a lot imho - I did some work a while back fitting flat planes to pointclouds, and ended up with mesh model anything from 40x to 100x smaller data than the ptcloud dataset. see quato.xyz for samples where you can compare the cloud, the mesh produced.. and view the 3D model in recent browsers.

My approach had some similarity to gaussian splats... but using only planar regions .. great for buildings made of flat slabs, less so for smooth curves and foliage.

Applying their MeshAnything algo to fine meshes from photogrammetry scans of buildings would be of great benefit - probably getting those meshes down to a size where they can be shared as 3D webgl/threejs pages.

Even deciding on triangle points to efficiently tesselate / cover a planar region with holes etc, is basically a knapsack problem, which heuristics, monte-carlo and ML can improve upon.

[fsloth]

If you want to show photogrammetric pointclouds of buildings potree db&algorithm is pretty good and if you don’t like the library for some reason it’s pretty easy to reimplement (potree.org).

You just dump the pointcloud to a hierarchical octree and at viewer end just download the nodes in your frusttum and voila.

There are other approaches but this wins hands down on usability/simplicity.

[spookie]

Could you go more in depth with your approach? Sounds really usefull for man made structures!

[toxik]

Surely you heard about surfels, sounds like a very similar approach.

[bhouston]

Definitely the best result for low polygon creation I've seen. Great job!

Still triangles rather than polygons, but we are getting closer.

The end goal should be:

1) Polygons, mostly 4 sided, rather than triangles.

2) Edge smoothness/creases to separate hard coders from soft corners. (Which when combined with polygons enables SubD support: https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfa...)

3) UV for textures that are aligned with the natural flow of textures on those components.

4) Repeating textures (although sometimes not) that work with the UVs and combine to create PBR textures. (Getting closer all the time: https://gvecchio.com/stablematerials/)

After the above works, I think people should move on to inferring proper CAD models from an image. Basically infer all the constraints and the various construction steps.

[bognition]

why are polygons preferred over triangles?

[Stevvo]

I feel like maybe CAD would be easier? You only need represent form/edges, rather than meet all the requirements that you have for using a model for games/rendering.

[ramshanker]

I am all in for any development in this domain. Just to spread some sense of scale, We recently processed (manually) the point cloud scan of one of the (<1% of whole complex) working Oil Refinery. The total volume of point cloud was 450GByte. Our previous project of slightly larger scope was 2.1TByte.

So the scale shown in this paper feels like toys! Not undermining the effort at all. We need to start somewhere anyway.

For the same reason, I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

[alexvitkov]

Real life castles were designed to withstand a siege, video game castles are designed to give off a castle vibe. Once you've achieved that you stop adding stuff, as anything beyond that just creates problems - you start killing performance, visibility starts to suffer, it's not clear what's interactive and what is decoration, gameplay starts to take a hit as the AI and player start getting stuck in the clutter, etc, etc...

Most people don't care as they don't have deep knowledge of how a castle or a power plant really functions, you only notice oversimplifications in media in the field you work in.

It's also very likely the designers and artists didn't have time to do much research, and the whole thing is based off a Pinterest reference board.

[nkrisc]

> For the same reason, I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

Because they are games, not oil refinery simulators. They are typically intending to only convey a general sense of “industrial environment” and nothing more.

Do your models of oil refineries include the correct grass and other plant species growing in cracks in the pavement?

[sendfoods]

Could you go into some details here?

- sensors used

- postprocessing

- registration algorithm(s)

Are all things that would interest me greatly :)

[CyberDildonics]

I feel puzzled looking at Industrial scenes in Video Games. They are like 3 order of magnitude simplified compared to a real plant.

Really? You don't know why video games don't have 80 billion points and you don't know why a tool made to simplify meshes into video game objects isn't using your 80 billion point lidar scan?

For starters, these are meshes and you're talking about points. If anyone is meshing those points and they have any sense, they are working with "toy" sized chunks too so they avoid doing nearest neighbor calculations on terabytes of data.

[wildpeaks]

Calling AI-generated meshes "Artist-created" just because it aims to look similar as human-made ones is misleading.

[spookie]

I think it comes from the fact an artist can create the mesh themselves and optimize them using this approach.

[obsoletehippo]

I like how the Social Impact paragraph notes reduced labor costs, yay! Not e.g., reduced need for artists, so you're all out of a job.

[bee_rider]

One group finds a way to automate a job, and then our whole society agrees that the people who previously did that job should be tossed out into the street. But for some reason we blame the first group rather than the second.

[dsign]

It's a funny euphemism, in a dark sort of way. But if there is a domain where AI is not getting humans out of a job anytime soon, I think it's this one. I've read dozens of papers about remeshing, but for all of the research, very few algorithms make it to production pipelines. And those that do, still crash and fail in spectacular ways, even after a decade or more of refining and bug-fixing.

[yazzku]

"Our method points to a promising approach for the automatically generation of Artist-Created Meshes, which has the potential to significantly reduce labor costs in the 3D industry, thereby facilitating advancements in industries such as gaming, film, and the metaverse. However, the reduced cost of obtaining 3D artist-created meshes could also lead to potential criminal activities."

That last statement is worded in such a weird way, lol. Funny Chinese->English transliteration.

"The FBI has issued a warning for potential criminal activity resulting from the automatic generation of low-poly models. The public is advised to minimize outdoors exposure and report any suspicious activity."

[flockonus]

MeshAnything generates meshes with hundreds of times fewer faces, significantly improving storage, rendering, and simulation efficiencies, while achieving precision comparable to previous methods.

[Joel_Mckay]

So does instant-meshes, but it also doesn't necessarily improve the topology.

https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes

Cheers =)

[BoredPositron]

The converted meshes are not efficient. They are also full of n-gons so you need to retopo no matter what...

[andybak]

I can only see tris. It's quite rare to see .obj files with anything except triangles.

Or do you mean something like "contains implied ngons because of the way coplanar tri faces are arranged"?

[Paul_S]

Very good, hope they realise that you need tessellation for shading. Some of those models look a bit too optimised.

[dagmx]

The topology is decent but no artist is creating meshes like this. The name feels mismatched. I’ve seen some better topology generation papers at siggraph last year which addressed quads better, though I’d need to dig through my archive to find it.

The triangle topologies in this paper made don’t follow the logical loops that an artist would work as. Generally it’s rare an artist would work directly in triangles, versus quads. But that aside, you’d place the loops in more logical places along the surface.

The face and toilet really stand out to me as examples of meshes that look really off.

Anyway, I think this is a good attempt at a reasonable topology generation, but the tag line is a miss.

[iTokio]

Words have meanings, you can’t call AI generated meshes, “Artist created Meshes” not matter how good you think your results are.

Beside good topology is dependent on the use case, it’s very different if you are doing animation, a 3D print, a game or just a render.

[Joel_Mckay]

Yep, hard to reason with industry people pushing slop on commercial production teams.

Low-poly re-mesh tools have been around for ages (some better than others), but there are good reasons pro's still do this step manually all the time. Primarily "good" is based on _where_ the quads, loops, and unavoidable n-gons end up in the model (or stuff ends up looking retro 90's.)

There is also the complex legal side of algorithms not being able to create copyrightable works in some jurisdictions. Talk with your IP lawyer, this area gets messy fast when something famous or trademarked is involved.

Cheers, =3

[Animats]

Hm. I tried the online demo,

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Yiwen-ntu/MeshAnything

on the provided sample "hat". I tried with and without checking "Preprocess with marching cubes" and "Random Sample". Both outputs had holes in the output mesh where the original did not.

Am I doing this wrong, or is the algorithm buggy?

[emilk]

You can run it yourself here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/rerun/InstantMesh

[T-A]

That's InstantMesh, not MeshAnything.

The MeshAnything demo is at

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Yiwen-ntu/MeshAnything

[column]

I didn't find a way to download the mesh once generated. Is that option not available at all?

[debugnik]

Calling these meshes "Artist-Created Meshes" is disgusting. I know researchers in this field want the word "artist" to follow the same fate as "computer" thanks to their work, but it's too soon to say the least. Can we get AI researchers? I bet RLHF can make their writing more humble than the current ones.

Sentiments aside, that's an impressive approach.

[tamimio]

Looks interesting, I do have few complicated models will test it out and see.

[RobotToaster]

Why do people keep making their own special licenses?

https://github.com/buaacyw/MeshAnything/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...

[yazzku]

It's a BSD3-style license with a statement at the end that butchers the whole point of a BSD3 license.

[demondemidi]

Hugh Hoppe is rolling in his grave.

[Jarmsy]

Hugues Hoppe is alive and well!

https://hhoppe.com/

[jahewson]

Stunning!

[75viysoFET8228]

the service needs to be better, please improve and errors in the configuration of the website