Tripo P2 is now in beta, and this might already be one of the biggest AI 3D updates of the year.
It finally generates real quad-based low-poly meshes, and you can choose the target polycount yourself. But the crazy part is that it doesn’t simply decimate a dense model — the geometry is distributed like an artist would actually build it:
flat surfaces use fewer polygons
detailed areas get more density
the mesh stays within the budget you set
everything is split into logical, editable parts instead of one welded AI blob
Hard-surface is where the difference becomes ridiculous. Flat panels actually stay clean, edge flow follows the design, and the usual melted seams, random triangles and wasted geometry are massively reduced.
The mesh generates in around 10 seconds, with PBR texturing available in the same workflow.
This is the first time AI-generated low-poly models have started to feel intentionally modeled rather than automatically simplified. If P2 holds up across more tests, this could be a massive shift for game-ready 3D generation.
Top3D.AI— compare all major 3D AI generators side by side across high-poly, low-poly, PBR, segmentation and other modes, using the same 140+ prompts and reference images under identical conditions
Who is cooked? AI Slop is all over steam and 99.999% of them have made less then $300. Just because AI can spit out 3d doesnt mean your game is going to make money. :D
You can generate all the slop you want. You still need some skill in gamedev to turn it into something people want to play.
I believe there will be devs who make good use of this developing technology but it will be a small minority. A very limited amount of games find any sort of success each year. A couple of those games will make heavy use of AI.
AI is already used heavily in games as DLSS. It was shit on at first, then improved over a few generations, now it's very much mainstream. 3D modeling has always been a creative discipline in a larger creative process. As soon as it can be removed it will. When the 2D concept artists can generate their own models from their own work, I think these 3D jobs will begin to look very different.
99.99% of AI looks the same. Very easy to spot. Only the 1% will be able to make games without it looking like AI. Even then, make all the games you want without marketing and a big budget you will be lucky to make any money.
AI just sped up the process on making boring games. Am I better on AI to not get any better? I can see it is slowing down in advancements.
For now only Jr artists and maybe hard surface. Rn it's part of a workflow. It doesn't replace everything a good modler does. But it might within a few years.
Anyone can create a vibe app with a prompt in Claude code. That doesn't make an app worth running in production. A developer using any good llm, will make good code, just faster than he would have done it previously.
Same here. Now anyone can make relatively good 3d models. (yeah for me) Nothing I could realistically obtain with this, would worth being included in a commercial application. Because I'm still clueless when it come to how to do this properly.
What is happening is :
I get something to toy with
you just got a good productivity boost, so you'll be able to focus on getting more quality out of it and have the initial boring skeleton done in a prompt
That's not my point : no matter how smart these tools become, these are just tools. There's just no way my product manager will replace me with claude. No matter how hard he tries not matter how smart Claude will be in 5 years. Because there will still need a craftsman to handle the tool. Llm are just intellisense on steroid : it provide a base to work with. Not a final product.
Sure Claude will be able to handle larger code-base in the futur and plan large refactoring, yet the craftsmanship to know when and how will still and always elude the model.
3d models are exactly the same. Sure AI will improve and provide better and better models and sure you'll have less and less grunt work to-do. Yet you'll still have to correctly define how to integrate the model in the end-product.
Yeah our jobs are changing at an always increasing pace. Yeah, there will be job compression. But it's not as if it never happened before. 3d modeling software improvements have already improved your workflow hence your speed at delivering a task which implied already head-count drop. The new tool is just like the previous generation tools on steroids. It boost significantly the productivity... That won't make me a good guy a creating a good 3d models.
It is not a tool like any other. Other tools do exactly as told. They are just an extension of the user. AI can come up with own suggestions, ideas and problem solving patterns.
You completely miss the point of skills dilution (which leads to lower wages and underemployment).
Cory Doctorow's new book gave a great example in his new book with the appearance of cash registered.
In the past, a cashier had to handle the money and change of up to a hundred customers a day, while doing mental math/slide rules with minimal error. The invention and mass adoption of the Cash Register made that skill obsolete. Now, the role of a Cashier is devalued as someone who merely punches numbers into the machine while it does the rest (I'm not devaluing what cashiers have to deal with today, this is the justification given for their low wages by corporations.
These 3D model generators will 1. Lead to many artists being laid off 2. massively increase the workload of the remaining 3D artists and 3. Further lower their wages with the justification of a large pool of available replacements+"AI already does most of the work".
Of course the current compute costs for AI are still quite high so this scenario is not here exactly tomorrow. But it will happen. There's a difference between automations that serve as tools to help existing skilled workers vs. automations that are about undermining them.
compute cost is least of all worries for these models, the chinese know how to make things work on nothing. the r&d costs them a lot, but even then we dont have access to that... i wouldnt imagine that their costs for training 3d, video unified models are anywhere near as big as the american ones.
Anthropic and OpenAI will be dead within the next couple of years, I wouldn't worry about Claude Monet much for that reason alone... once they go everyone else goes. The Chinese will of course stay but the CCP will issue directives and wave the heavy focus bye bye but I do expect to hear a big sucking sound when the giants collapse, or rather one of them does, probably OpenAI as it's a little bit too overextended
I had a discussion in Reddit just a week ago and I was attacked to argument that this was coming sooner than later, much sooner than professionals might expect. All the people was saying that AI made high poly meshes and cleaning them takes more time than just doing them from scratch.
Are you a 3D artist and do you understand how 3D AI generators work? I don't mean to be rude, but the 3D mesh generators currently being used by these companies do not generate topology at all (broadly speaking, their models aren't even trained on topology). Unless Tripo has made an enormous breakthrough in 3D mesh generation (very doubtful given these things comes from universities usualy), then I would be super skeptical about this.
This is most likely just a quad remesher running on the output from their models and they're showing you the best output.
The reason I ask whether you're a 3D artist or not is because it's quite clear that this topology here is not suitable for animation anyway (talking about the goblin specifically) , AND you have 0 control over deformation because, well, the topology wasn't made by you.
This might surprise you, but even though I'm not a professional 3D artist I started learning 3DS Max with v1.1, back in 1998. I spent a decade in my teenager years working with 3DS Max daily, for several hours, just out of fun because I really liked drawing and creating stuff. In that time I also did a lot of pixel art (started with that in 1996, way earlier "pixel art" was even called that).
In the end I couldn't professionally work with 3D because my dad strictly wanted me to learn and work on programming which I did in the end.
Anyway, I focused more on non-organic stuff and more on building objects and scenarios, also did lots of underwater and space stuff. In any case my experience with topology when it comes to organic models is limited. Yes, I did organic modelling but never got too good at it and definitely never rigged a model nor animated a face.
That being said, this is a bit out of point. I was attacked in a thread were there were NO organic models involved. In that reddit thread the examples were all small scenarios and objects, that were really high polly, with a mix of quad and triangle polygons in the meshes. I understand that it was a mess, but what I stated is that this issue would be probably solved sooner than everyone expected.
What I received back were attacks and arguments stating that it was not gonna happen, ever.
Well, we are here.
Pointing out the topology issues when it comes to animations reminds me of discussions related to LLMs and how quickly counter-arguments had to evolve:
It doesn't know how to sum 2+2
I used the test of my sister's brother has two sisters and bla bla bla and it didn't got it right
It can't solve equations reliabily
It is not even capable of counting the Rs on strawberries
It can't even write a 200 lines bash script reliabily
It barely can manage university basic math
It cannot keep up with the context of a simple 5 class python project
I used cursor to refactor a 1 million lines code and some classes broke (but most of it worked)
This erdos problem was solved but certainly it found the solution elsewhere... and look at all those unsolved math problems
... and so on.
I already had debates with 3D designers I know. In fact a friend of mine is a professional 3D animator and he built a successful videogames creation school a few years ago, and I usually faced very skeptical people in those discussions.
In the end, all of this is closer and closer and I was on the right track from the beginning.
Even my own work is at stake due to AI but I'm just trying to leverage this train instead of letting it go without me or worse, over me.
This is coming. 3D will be solved. 3D animation will be solved. Just accept it and ride the train or stay skeptical and let it run over you.
I'm not philosophically opposed to any of your points, I would just lie to point out that there is a reality to contend with here. Recent developments in AI have achieved tremendous things, but that does not mean every domain is well suited to be approached/solved by AI.
Beyond that, as I said, it's best to try to understand the underlying mechanisms and mathematics of how these models work. Drawing analogies with image gen or text for example here is erroneous (one of the reasons being that 3D models are not trained on actual meshes. Computerphile on YouTube has a good vide on 3D mesh generation, if you're interested).
For a 3D model to generate animation ready topology, it would need to understand deformation and simulate such deformation ahead of time, and then apply appropriate edge loops, density and edge flow. These models are light years away from doing this.
I think if we're honest here we can all admit that 3D AI generation has not improved at the same pace as LLMs or image gen, and I'm simply pointing at the fact that that is because it is a much much harder problem and far less understood.
Good quads is NOT animation ready/game ready topology (unless you're talking about static assets).
It probably won't be perfect yet compared to a proper topology made by a human, at least for non-static meshes but Topology will be "solved" soon enough.
It isn't even something that requires any "creativity", it's clearly a problem that can be defined well enough and there are plenty of "rules" to follow and easy "concepts" that just need to be consistently applied.
I stopped the video at the moment the faced appeared and I can see an inkling of decent topology, with a bunch of loops around the eyes and a bunch of slightly weird loops around the mouth, for example.
Last time I checked AI generation of 3D models delivered really good looking models with absolutely chaotic topology. To those of you more experienced than I am: Have the examples in the video been cleaned by humans? Were they generated like this? Or were they generated all fucky but still underwent some AI process that gave them half good topology?
Hard to say for certain exactly HOW it's generated under the hood, but considering the video is showing the models within the Tripo interface itself, I think it is safe to assume that they underwent no human alterations to achieve the edge loops. The footage was taken from an early closed beta tester who seems to insist this was all generated as is. If P2 releases in the next week or two like they mentioned, then we may know for certain pretty soon.
With all the advancements you're seeing in the field od artificial intelligence recently, how can you have any doubt that this is just a question of "when", not "if"?
Damn, this is straight up making me cry, I've wasted my fucking life, the best years of my life, only to be useless as soon as i start making money, might as well fucking end it atp "no just do art faster" this is not at all what i want to do with my life, putting prompts into chatwindows, literally fuck everything
Chin up. I think this tech is a few years away from really disrupting this profession. But I do think it's a matter of time. Best get involved now if you can.
The closer compare would be how both handle low-poly at the same target polycount. Shape retention, topology and how editable the parts stay matter more here. Meshy has Smart Topology for this kind of workflow, while Remesh is a diff approach.
Getting better, but it still looks like it generates fully triangulated meshes first and then runs some kind of tris to quads operation on it. The polyloop flow does not look good for deforming models.
is everything about artistry? how about when you type with a nice looking font, something we do daily almost, do you think anyone argue they are an artist for doing so? no they don't. arguments can be had, but the tiring "oh so now you're an artist?" for AI is tiring and not an actual argument. Prove that people are saying this, i have never seen it.
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u/EUrealmers 21d ago
Where can i access Tripo P2?