Want to generate 3D models on your own computer? You can!
There are now plenty of AI-powered generators available online that can accept text prompts or image inputs and automatically generate a 3D model for you. For good or evil, we’ve seen plenty of AI content appear in popular online 3D model sites.
But all of those 3D models were made using these services. The services are actually giant banks of servers located somewhere, and they hold your data. If you’re generating something you want kept secret, sending and housing data offsite to an unknown set of servers is probably a bad idea.
But how can you generate your own 3D models without using these services?
It turns out there is a relatively easy way to do so, using an open-source tool called “Modly”.
Modly is a front end for an AI model that is focused on generating 3D model content. Its interface is remarkably similar to many of the online services, but it runs entirely locally on your machine.
In Modly, you can perform Text to 3D or Image to 3D, just as you would in one of the big online services. And, Modly is entirely free to download and run as it is fully open-sourced.
There’s just one catch: you have to have an AI model providing the “brains” under the covers to Modly.
How on Earth do you do that? There are several ways, but probably the easiest is to use another open-source tool, Ollama. It also runs on your machine and can download plenty of different open-sourced AI models and run them.
Ollama is easily installed, and then you can run any of several AI models.
But where’s the catch?
The catch is that in order to run a sufficiently powerful 3D model locally, you have to be on a pretty beefy computer. That means a graphics card with oodles of VRAM, and many desktop machines won’t be able to properly run Modly because of that.
However, if you are capable of running your own AI model, you might want to give Modly a try: make your own 3D models, right on your desktop, even when completely offline.
Via Modly
