Tafi's Text-to-3D Revolution: The End of Manual Character Creation?

0:00Welcome to the chat GPT podcast. I'm your host Jaden Schaefer. Every day on the podcast we cover what is breaking in AI. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about a really cool new project that does text to 3D character generation. I want to break down a few other projects. Now, the thing I'll say really quick is if you are watching this on Spotify, I know most of my listeners are on Apple Podcasts. If you have Spotify, I recommend watching this one on Spotify because I'm going to show you some demos of a couple of these products that are really impressive, show you some 3D worlds that have been created, and some 3D character creation tools.

0:36So check this out on Spotify if possible. If not, I'll describe it on for all of the 70 % of you, I think, that listen on Apple Podcasts. So in any case, a recent project just dropped. But before I talk about that, I do want to really quickly put a shout out to a project I have been working on for six months, which is called AI Box. It is the App Store for AI. We are building it out right now. And if you want to get on the wait list to be one of the first people that can build a very powerful AI tool with, you don't need to know any coding. It's drag and drop, and you can link together multiple AI models with external third-party software and build these really cool tools, host them on our marketplace, and you'll receive royalties every time someone uses them.

1:17So if you want to get on the wait list for that, go over to AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link in the description of this video, and you can go check that out. Now, the thing I do want to say is this new project is called Taffy, and recently, essentially, they unveiled a pretty revolutionary engine that really changes the creative process for artists, developers, and professionals doing a 3D character generation. And I have, you know, this is interesting because a couple months ago, there was a story that kind of went viral. It was a post on Reddit. I'll read it in a minute, but it was someone complaining essentially about tools like this.

1:53They were actually complaining about MidJourney. And this, I feel like, goes one step further. So it's kind of, I don't know, another knife in the gut for someone like that. But this is really powerful technology and is someone that personally in the past has worked on and helped design VR applications. And especially with Apple's new Vision Pro that it was just announced yesterday, I think that this is really relevant technology. This is going to make really big moves in the AR and VR space and also for just games in general. So essentially what Taffy is doing is they're harnessing the really extensive database of exclusive, it's called their Genesis character platform.

2:32And so they have a platform where you can, where people can design and create 3D characters. Now, I think this is really important because number one, they're not, you know, just ripping this off of the internet or off of open source places. They actually own the rights to this. And so I think that's what gives them the power. The thing I will say though, is like, I think a lot of different creators upload their stuff to the platform. And they say that they're a very ethical platform, it's opt-in only and creators have the option to have their characters using the training model and they're compensated for the usage of, I believe, characters similar to their characters.

3:08So from the way I've seen this, they're really doing this right. And this is going to be really powerful. And apparently it has the capability to generate 10s of billions of distinct 3d character variations. So in their upcoming update, Taffy's compatibility with popular game engines and 3D software applications will be further enhanced, including pretty comprehensive support of Nvidia's Omniverse. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen a little bit if you're on Spotify, and if not, you'll just be able to listen and I'll explain what's going on. But on their platform, their AI text to 3D character generation engine, they have a couple examples of kind of what their platform can do.

3:53And so they have it where they have like a prompt box. They say, make me a middle aged Asian man. It really quickly creates an Asian man. They say, make him older, make him shorter. It quickly gives him gray hair, makes him shorter. And this is all a 3D object. They say, you know, give him like some cool clothes from a sci-fi thing. It gives him a bunch of different outfits from sci-fi. It says, make him a woman with short hair. It very quickly is able to just transform it all from a text input box. It, you know, makes her old and bald. Then it says, go back to the old man. It turns it back into the old man again.

4:26And then they go so far as saying, show me the four stages of him turning into an alien. And it creates four different variations. First of him kind of being normal, going all the way until he's an alien. They then say, export this into Unreal Engine and put it into my scene on like an alien planet. and it does that. So this is a very, very powerful technology. I'm really impressed with what they're doing here. And I see a lot of innovation, the ability for you to use a text prompt and essentially generate some of these really powerful things. As I said, they call themselves an ethical platform.

4:59All content is opt-in and artist contributors are compensated. And I think what's really powerful here is that it's going to be able to export directly to game engines so that you can have this straight into the projects you're currently building it very user-friendly it's just straight up a text field that you can kind of input and there are hundreds of different settings you can do you know like you can adjust the roundness of the face the how square the face is how young the face is how thin the body is so beyond just creating these you can then go and edit them and change them to be exactly what you're looking for for your particular game or application now Now, the reason I think this is important is because up until this point, it has been very costly, expensive, and challenging.

5:44It's pretty tricky to create these 3D characters for games or for applications or for anything you're working on. So I think this is a really powerful technology that has been built. And I think that this is something that is now going to be very available to the masses. Now, this isn't to say it's without its controversies. A lot of people are complaining. Just a couple months ago, there was a post that went viral on Reddit. I'll read it to you. Um, essentially the title says I lost everything that made me love my job through mid journey overnight. It says, it's, it says I'm an employee as a 3d artist in a small games company of 10 people.

6:19Our art team is two people. We make 3d models just to render them and get 3d sprites for the engine, which are more easy to handle than 3d. So I, sorry, I guess they're making 2d sprites for the engine and then, um, they're making mobile games. So my job is different now since Mid Journey V5 came out last week. I'm not an artist anymore or a 3D artist. Right now, all I do is prompting, photoshopping, and implementing good-looking pictures. The reason I went to be a 3D artist in the first place is gone. I wanted to create form in 3D space, sculpt, create with my own creativity, with my own hands.

6:54I came over, it came overnight for me. I had no choice and my boss also had no choice. I am now able to create, rig, and animate a character that spits out from mid-journey in two to three days before it took us several weeks in 3D. The difference is I care. He does not. For my boss, it's just a huge time-slash-money saver. I don't want to make art that is the result of scraping internet content from an artist that we're not asked. However, it is hard to see results are better than my own work. I am angry. My 3D colleague is completely fine with it. He prompts all day shows and gets praise. The thing is, we both are not at the same level quality wise.

7:41My work was always a tad better in shape and texture rendering. I was always very sure I wouldn't lose my job because I produce slightly better quality. The advantage is gone and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create. Getting a job in the game industry is always hard, but leaving a company, a nice team, because AI took my job feels very dystopian. I doubt it would be better in a different company also. I am between grief and anger, and I'm sorry for using your AI art fellow artists. Okay, so this came out just two months ago, and I think this just highlights how fast the industry has changed.

8:17Mid-Journey completely upended a lot of jobs and how things were being done in that space due to it, But I think we've just taken with Taffy a whole nother step, right? It said, he said in the past, it was taking them several weeks to get a 3D character. Now it was two to three days. Okay, well, guess what? Now it is 10 minutes or five minutes of tweaking on Taffy because this thing is incredibly fast, incredibly powerful, and it can make anything that you're looking for. So in fact, you could go on mid-journey, get inspiration if you still wanted to, and then just type in some prompts into Taffy to actually get it to create a person.

8:54So I think that, yeah, this is pretty rough for people whose jobs are being replaced. But at the same time, this makes it more accessible for everyone. And as someone who personally can't design that and who has wanted to for different projects I've been making, I see this as a Taffy, for example, is a very powerful tool and enabling, you know, the masses to be able to access some of this technology. So I think while it, I, yeah, I don't know what to say. It is hard, but it is what it is. And this is a very incredible and very powerful technology. And the one other thing I wanted to, um, show with this technology is that there was a recent other project.

9:31I think I've talked about a couple of times on some podcasts called Skybox AI. And essentially it allows you, um, to create these 3d environments where you just type in the text box and it creates an entire 3d world for you. So on their homepage, they have one that is like a bunch of mountains in Arizona. Now I just recently tested this out and I typed in create a tropical island with waves and dolphins around it. And I selected realistic, you can do anime, art style, fantasy lands, digital painting, there's a bunch of different things you can do. It created one. Now, it's not perfectly realistic, obviously, I think there's a lot of tweaking that could happen on this.

10:07But it is pretty impressive compared to some other 3d islands and arts that I've seen. It's funny, because I said, create a tropical island with waves and dolphins around it. It definitely is a tropical island. It's got the palm trees, the sand, the beach, the ocean, the waves. And then there's just like a random dolphin flying through the air. I think there might be a couple of those. Yeah, there's a couple of random dolphins just flying through the air. So I think you definitely have to tweak that. But honestly, pretty impressive. It rendered this in about, I want to say, a minute and a half.

10:35And this is very, I mean, I'm sure I could come up with a lot more complex prompt, try to make this a lot more, you know, ultra realistic, high def. But very, very impressed. I used to buy these similar kind of scenes online for my for a VR app I created for self pause, so you could just like meditate in different locations and kind of like look all around if you wanted. But I see this technology is getting very powerful, you can download this, you can export this, you can edit this very, very powerful technology. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this entire area continues to evolve.

11:09I think we see like a lot of major advancements in the way that 3D models are being created, characters, and then 3D environments. Next is going to be 3D objects. They'll probably be a platform. If not, you just link all of these will link to Unity where you put all of these things together and can create really complex 3D environments. And it's not very far off for me to assume that you could, if you wanted the same theme and style for all of them, eventually some of these platforms, you'll be able to say make six characters like x y and z in an environment like this on a map like this that do these things and just generates all of that content for you it's going to be absolutely insane um and i think you know to the point of the reddit post that seemed kind of sad you know at the end of it he signs off like i'm sorry for using your art fellow artists well taffy doesn't have that ethical dilemma like artists opted into it and artists are getting paid for it so it's like a little bit to be honest it's a little bit less sad it's actually just like a new revenue you stream for some of those artists.

12:05And I think that it's, this is just the way that everything is going. So it'll be very interesting to continue to follow this into the future. Thank you so much for listening and watching the podcast today. If you liked it, I would really, really appreciate it. If you review it on Spotify or Apple music or wherever you listen to your podcasts, it helps the show out a ton for just new people to find it. In addition, if you want to join a community of really awesome people that comment on what's happening in AI all the time, make sure to join the Facebook link for our Facebook community. I'll leave a link in the description to this.

12:36And as always, have a wonderful rest of your day.