Molding the Imagination: Using AI to Create New 3D-Printable Objects

Transforming your ideas into tangible artifacts using Midjourney and open-source projects: Shap-E, MVDream, and threestudio

3D-Printed Objects Generated by AI Systems from Text Prompts, Image by Author

If you have been reading my articles on Medium, you know I like to run experiments using AI for creative endeavors and write about my experiences. I have covered areas like image generation, creative writing, and music composition. For the first time, I expanded my research into the third dimension. I looked into using commercial and open-source AI tools to create new physical objects and printed them using a 3D printer. In this article, I will show you the steps I took to design and print four different 3D meshes using various commercial and open-source tools. You will find all four objects in the 3D Gallery in the appendix.

Overview

In the following sections, I will walk you through four experiments I ran using different tools for 3D-object generation and show the results. The first was using commercial tools: Midjourney for creating a 2D image and a website called 3dMaker.ai for extracting a 3D mesh, a file that contains the geometry for display and printing in 3D. The second experiment used an open-source AI model from OpenAI called Shape-E [1]. The third used an…