poolio

should work, and there are tons of new differentiable mesh and volumetric representations to try!

it's a good idea :)

With smooth enough geometry converting NeRFs to meshes with marching cubes works pretty well. Would you say the topology of meshes on our website are still too incoherent for rigging?

not yet, but see the appendix of the paper for pseudocode. the core update step from the diffusion model that powers dreamfusion is surprisingly simple and easy to implement.

hi folks, ben p from the dreamfusion paper here. happy to answer qs for the next ~hour!

I think you're both right! It is incredible that the 2D model knows enough about the visual world to produce many objects from all angles, but the 3D model is essential for gluing these views together, and in some ways can fill in the gaps the 2D model doesn't know about. Imagine just taking a huge collection of photographs of an object. While there is enough information in those photos to reconstruct the 3D object, I wouldn't personally call that collection of images "an understanding of 3D." In our case, the diffusion model is the collection of photos and the NeRF model + optimization procedure is what figures out how all those photos can be related to a shared underlying 3D representation. - ben p (author)

directly training a NeRF on a single image is a terribly unconstrained problem that would lead to a volume that looks bad when the viewpoint changes. the gist of render + use diffusion model to refine is a great idea though and core to our method! the details of how to use the diffusion model for this refinement was the challenge, but once we figured that out it... just worked :)

yep our fixed strategy for view-dependent prompting is silly and there is tons of room for improvement!

just seems to work when the 3D model is simple and smooth

Yes, this is often a problem. We use view-dependent prompts (e.g. "cat wearing sunglasses, back view") but the pretrained 2D model often does not do a good job of interpreting non-canonical views and will put sunglasses on the back of the cats head (as well as the front).

Co-author here - we were also surprised :) The breadth of knowledge of the visual world embedded in these 2D models and what they unlock is astounding.