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Comment by Larok00 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was more progress in text-to-3D mesh for creating basic but very specific and functional shapes. With the last few years of progress, it really feels like it should be possible, but none of the big players are finding it worthwhile to look at. It would give the 3D printing community a massive boost.

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Depends what "very specific and functional shapes" you have in mind, I guess. For my use of a 3D printer, I believe something like OpenSCAD is going to be a significantly more efficient textual description of the object than ~english -- for me and the computer.

OpenSCAD will definitely be more efficient but not as many people speak it fluently. When we learn or talk about objects, we do it in English, even if we have to resort to very technical jargon. I think this is a case of opening it up to more people rather than making it more efficient for people who already do this.

Hi, can you explain this problem a bit more. I’m a new PhD student and love low-hanging fruit.

I haven't thought it through completely, but it could start out as basically dall-E but for 3d meshes. Then what would be really useful if it could faithfully represent some specs you give it. Dimensions, shape, etc. Imagine all the specific instructions someone who knows a lot about gears (but nothing about how to use CAD) could give as a prompt. All these specs should be followed faithfully. It should be able to create any arbitrary gear you describe to it. Gears are just one simple example but you get the idea.

Do we really want a boom in the field of half baked plastic trinkets made on a whim without much consideration put into them? I think something made on a whim is a lot more likely to be discarded. If somebody wants something made out of plastic, it should at least be something they're sure they want. Having some human time invest some time in designing it seems like a good thing.

I think this is putting the cart before the horse. In my experience, the reason many 3d prints are useless trinkets (NOT functional parts) is because it takes a lot of effort to design your own custom piece. Most 3d prints that are actually useful are custom to your use case.

The amount of effort it takes makes it so that if something close enough exists, I will buy it online. If it doesn't exist I will not bother designing it from scratch since this is not a massive part of my life that I'm willing to sink much more time into than it is worth.

When you want a very specific shape, text is probably not the right input modality. See also image generation, where to get very specific outputs, you're better off defining the large-scale structure spatially with a controlnet and only using text for the visual style and decorative details that do not need to be precisely controlled.

What shapes would you ask a text-to-3D model to create for you?

That makes me wonder whether an LLM for code generation could actually work for OpenSCAD-style designs as well, especially as it has a quite small set of functions. The only thing that makes me doubtful is that the coordinates have to correctly map to 3D space.

Have you seen https://text-to-cad.zoo.dev/ ?

But yes, there's a lot of potential and, in my uneducated opinion, low hanging fruits for 3D printing especially.

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