printpal announced they’ve hit a significant milestone.
The service is a kind of 3D model repository, but with a heavy emphasis on AI generation. While other repositories are battling AI slop, printpal provides direct AI tools for generation. The company is embracing AI capabilities, rather than trying to control them.
The Chicago-based company just announced they’ve hit an amazing 100,000 registered users after launching only eight months ago. This is quite an achievement, and tells us that there are plenty of users that really do want to use AI generation to create 3D models.
The concept here is to lower the barrier to entry for 3D modeling, which has been one of the key factors holding back the 3D print industry from more general use. People usually now understand what a 3D printer is, and may even have one — but most people have no clue how to make a 3D model.
That’s because the traditional tools, 3D CAD systems, tend to be quite complex and beyond the capabilities of normal humans to learn.
Does the system work? Indeed it does. I gave it a quick try with my portrait benchmark image. As you can see here it produced an excellent result that was quite printable.
You can select fast or detailed 3D model generation, and the downloadable output can be in STL, GLB, OBJ or point cloud formats.
After generation it’s possible to download the result and 3D print the generated 3D model.
The service offers both free and paid options. The free option provides for ten AI 3D model generations per month (image to 3D), which is sufficient for casual use.
However, if you want more, the US$10 per month plan provides 200 generations, and also permits the use of text prompts along with image input. This means you can change the styling and appearance of the resulting 3D model based on an image.
There is also a US$25 per month plan for 500 generations, and printpal also offers a custom plan for anything beyond that.
Could printpal’s approach be an indication of how future 3D models will be handled? Today’s existing 3D model repositories are all based on the CAD System to 3D model to upload concept, but could this change as a result of new AI tools?
If an AI generator was sufficiently advanced, you would not even need a repository: you could just generate a model whenever you required one. The only missing element is creativity, which still comes from individuals. At printpal you can see that creativity from the models generated by their many users in their growing marketplace.
Via printpal
