Astounding but I can't help be be underwhelmed at the results. Look at the Shelby Cobra dropped in at 1:01 [0] - it's a vaguely grey car-shaped thing like all of the rest of the models that captures little of the source image.
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It seems like an April Fool's joke to me. The dramatic narration overlaid on lumpy terrible-looking cars made me laugh out loud several times. I mean, I'm sure what they're doing is technically impressive but the results are downright awful. All the cars look like they're beaten to hell and back and I honestly wouldn't be able to pick "KITT" out of a lineup of any other black car if it weren't for the cylon light on the front.
> The dramatic narration overlaid on lumpy terrible-looking cars made me laugh out loud several times.
The horses did it for me. It made it look like some low effort parody.
2:30 for horses https://youtu.be/dvjwRBZ3Hnw
I was thinking that the results looked pretty bad, until the video mentioned storyboarding and it clicked to me. Even as low-quality as the models are, they still can work great as placeholders. So this would allow very quick iteration on designing a overall scene, pulling items from reference images from google searches etc, and when you are happy with the result you can send it to an army of 3d modelers (or designers or whatev) to be built.
So the comparison point should probably be like grey boxes or whatev people have been using as placeholders/throwaways so far, and compared to that these generated models actually look pretty great
Maybe, though for storyboarding I would have thought you can just use existing generic models or make very primitive ones very quickly.
I'd just use a prism with two textured faces, and the edge of the texture smeared around the curvy edge.
Definitely not great... I bet that in a few years I bet it will be shockingly good. Experts have probably been working on it for years, and now that they've chosen a sufficient model structure with effective convolutions and whatnot, it's just a matter of tweaking the parameters and feeding it more and more data (3D scanning tools are making this easier as time goes on too).
You mean until they overfit it with 3D models of every single car ever made.
!remind me in a few years
That’s just the “texture” view. There’s also the parts and materials view that helpful segmented the various pieces of the car.
I’m not sure why they chose to show off the “texture” view without even explaining what it is.
Also, while it may look iffy right now, it seems they’ve done the heavy lifting. A round of polish and in a couple years nobody will be laughing at this. (I’m already impressed, personally).
> it seems they’ve done the heavy lifting
The heavy lifting is the not-yet-done fine details in the 3D-models. Vaguely car-shaped blobs not even respecting the original general shape of the car (e.g. the Cobra or the Toyota SUV) but with the correct texture extrapolated is nifty, but nothing more.
The horse is hilariously bad:
Yeah...that looks...frankly worse than the kind of thing I did in my undergrad 3d graphics class, where we did some edge detection, tessellated it, and projected it into 3D space.
>This gives creators of any skill level the ability to easily generate models for diverse uses - storyboarding, pre-vis, game content, architectural models, and more.
It sounds like they expect you to use it when you just need a vaguely correct shape anyway, at least as a starting point for further refinement.
Kitt itself looks like a Nissan with a rounded butt :-)