2022/12/16 by Alex Nichol, Nichol, Alex, Heewoo Jun +7 · 68 citations
Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.08751
openalex publication_date 2022/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While recent work on text-conditional 3D object generation has shown promising results, the state-of-the-art methods typically require multiple GPU-hours to produce a single sample. This is in stark contrast to state-of-the-art generative image models, which produce samples in a number of seconds or minutes. In this paper, we explore an alternative method for 3D object generation which produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image. While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases. We release our pre-trained point cloud diffusion models, as well as evaluation code and models, at https://github.com/openai/point-e.