Make a 3D model from an AI image with FREE tools!

hi everybody i am back with another video on creating a full 3d object from an image generated via ai and that could be by text or image prompt it doesn't matter um a lot of the views of my last video wanted to see a version made using more accessible tools so thank you for the comments on that and for checking out my channel i wasn't expecting the interest quite honestly but this ai stuff is a hot topic right now so for this video instead of photoshop 3ds max nald and tool bag i'll be using photopia shader map 4 and of course blender for the 3d part so this video is for anyone who wants to get a little more from their ai generated images maybe you want to export 3d model into vr or a game engine or maybe you'd like to 3d print your creation whatever it is so first of all some caveats and i'm putting these here because i'll be chewed in the comments i know i will otherwise so first caveat is this won't work for every image that you create the second caveat is i'm not a blender expert i'm not even a blender user but i hope to change that so i don't have all of the fastest key combos and keyboard shortcuts and wizardry and whatnot and number three is that there are plenty of ways to go about doing this and this method may not be the fastest or the most streamlined but will definitely get you where you need to go and it is free so we're going to make um the same kind of alien faberge egg as before except this time we're going to do it using free tools so this is rendered here this one here is in tool bag for your rendering i will leave to you but it should be possible to get somewhat similar results using ev inside blender okay let's go on over to discord then and just check on some of the prompts so i had been using the prompt faberge egg xenomorph biomechanical vertebrae aspect three is to four and that aspect was just to try and fit the entire egg into one kind of portrait image and i also use the dash dash test prompt which is new to discord in the last couple of weeks and it uh it's an alternative algorithm for generating this stuff and it was worth the look and i liked where it was going so i did a couple of variations of this and you can see there's a kind of an organic rib cage or an exoskeleton that has kind of appear sort of grown over the the egg inside and then there's a couple of kind of fleshy techy biomechanical bits underneath so um good luck making something with that in whatever ai you're using and i'm settling for something that looks like this there we go and i can show you that i said we're going to use free software this is xn view i am going to nip on over into photopia there we go and this is our image and this if you haven't seen photography before it's basically like a kind of a photoshop clone that works in a browser it is free to use and it's ad supported so it's worth checking out if you're ever in a jam even you know the the photoshop shortcuts work well um it's a little slower than local photoshop but that shouldn't bother us today so let's take a look at this image it's pretty nice i mean some of the details as ever with ai generated concepts like this kind of becomes a bit nonsensical but i definitely think there's enough here that we can work with and i'm going to make this in real time hopefully it won't take more than you know 15 minutes or so so we'll we'll see how that goes um so one thing i'd be cautious about so this is going to end up being our kind of diffuse uh texture our albedo texture and you know one thing you want to stay away from is these extremely dark areas here kind of want to fill those in a little bit so what i'd suggest for something like this is first of all i'm going to create a new layer just so i'm working non-destructively and i can always revert to the one underneath i'm going to go to select i'm going to choose color range and i'm going to just kind of try and pick here a range that will just grab those very dark areas something like that looks good okay and you can see by the marching ants there we've kind of selected all of the really really dark areas and for this i'm just going to try it see if it flies i'm going to go to edis i'm going to go to fill or the shortcut is shift and f5 and if uh foreground or background is selected here you want to choose content aware and content aware is going to look at the pixels that surround the areas that we have selected and it's trying going to it's going to try and intelligently kind of fill in detail in our selected areas based on that this might just create more gibberish but i think you know at this stage kind of anything is better than those dark areas so let's go and have a look at that ctrl and d to deselect compare it to the one underneath you can see it has lightened these areas in here and even that is is better than just having that kind of um that darkness in there so yeah that's pretty good go something like that and then beyond this this is the point where i mean you can try and do some you know what you might want to do is depending on your image and how it looks you might want to use some shadows and highlights correction in here and just to bring it up to more kind of albedo standards um in terms of hue and nothing about this is physically accurate you know we're working from concept images this is all about speed um so let's call that done i'm pretty happy with that where that has left us okay good stuff so now we can go file we can go export as i'm going to choose png i'm not going to monkey about too much with this stuff just hit save and that's going to go to my downloads folder okay so i've gone ahead and copied that to my folder i'm going to use for this particular um project the next part is shader map pro and i'll put the links to these applications in the description but here shader map pro is will do something similar to nald and there are paid tiers available so support them if you can if you get some use for it there's also a free tier for kind of non-commercial purposes which is going to suit us for today just going to click on this folder in the middle and this is going to ask us to browse to our project folder and i'm going to choose the newly created albedo here now these textures are not power of two again this is not really you know getting into too much detail about bit depth and test texture resolution this is about getting end to end as quickly as possible so here's the shader map interface as you can see we can kind of pan around here and what we've got here is the result of the original input texture being converted to a normal kind of a pseudo specular height map and ambient occlusion and it's kind of done that in the background when we just loaded it so up here on the top right what you should see is there is a material editor and there are three slots up here and they are similar but not the same so the first one here on the top left is standard the next one over is displace and the one after that is parallax we're interested in this place so let's click the second one over and drag and drop it onto our cylinder and what you can see now is that we're starting to get that extrusion on the silhouette that we we really want to make our our 3d model okay that's pretty good one thing that concerns me at this early stage is just the amount of displacement coming off the top of the egg that could lead to a little bit of a few issues with it down the line but we should be able to correct those so let's just take a look at each of the textures in depth here's the normal map that was created and there's one thing i would do i would kind of i would tend to bring up the high detail the high frequency detail a little bit more uh there's some nice kind of ridges on these on this rib cage that i would like to preserve in the shading so it's going to keep all those in all in all even for a tangent space normal map this is pretty flat looking so you know we we are going to be relying on a combination of the normal map and the height map to get something that's that's a bit prettier next up is specular we are probably not going to use this very much that's all right um let's take a look at the height and the height kind of looks like it's being desaturated and blurred a little bit but there should be enough there to get us something decent so again i'm not going to play about you can clamp the the high uh the bright pixels or the dark pixels you can play about the more time you put into this the better it's going to look in the end but right now i'm just kind of interested in getting through the video okay the one thing that was kind of disappointed about shader map out of the box was that i couldn't really get a very nice ambient occlusion map from it so we can forego the ambient occlusion map for this project so here uh you'll see a little save icon and says all beside us and if i hit all it's going to save and render each of the textures to the original directory that the albedo came from so if we have a look in our texture folder now you can see that we've got the normals and we've got the height and we've got the specular and we've got the ao so they're all in there and ready to go which is super useful that's going to keep take us out of shader map and we can move on into blender so i'm in blender 3.2.1 it's the latest available as this is being recorded and again i'm not a blender expert but i'm going to show you what i have found to be able to kind of muddle through and ultimately come up with that with something that looks like this let's go ahead and reset this scene okay as usual let's go in here and delete this blender cube but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the add menu up here or you can choose shift and a and that will do the same thing i'm going to choose uv sphere and what you'll notice down in the bottom left here if you're certainly if you're a blender beginner is that we have this little menu that has popped up and these are the creation parameters for the the sphere that we've just created so i'm going to work really low poly and it's just it's much much easier to work like this and then detail towards the end so instead of 32 segments i'm going to choose 8 and instead of 16 rings underneath i am going to choose 4 and hit enter and that gives us a really low poly sphere to work with and but that's absolutely perfect for our intents and purposes so i'm going to do next is i'm going to right click on the sphere and i'm going to choose shade smooth and without changing the geometry that's just going to give the shading the appearance of a more kind of a rounder sphere to take us back there okay cool so what i want to do next is i'm going to hit z or z depending on where you're from to go to the top viewport i'm going to go into edit mode on our object and i'm going to go into face mode inside edit mode okay what i want to do is kind of delete all the faces that are north of this red line here north of this axis so i'm going to marquee select press x and then faces and those are the front facing faces deleted so these the remaining ones here are the back facing faces select that again hit x and faces and now we have a hemisphere to work with where we're going to do half the work and we're happy here we're just going to mirror to the other side and that's going to save some time and effort down the line okay great stuff let's go back into object mode so the next thing is to bring in our texture okay so i'm going to hit over here to the material properties pad i'm going to hit new and you'll see that a new material has been created in this panel so what i'm going to do next is i'm going to choose the base color and that's going to be our albedo so hit this yellow dot beside base color and choose image texture and that's going to give you this dialogue here you can create a new texture or you can open one and we want to open an existing one is what we want to do so let's grab our albedo and that is now applied so why can't we see it well we have to change it the viewport into shaded mode and we can do that by hitting this option up here and that is going to display our texture on the model now we can see from looking at this that this is not really working uh too well and that's just because we haven't matched our uvs to the texture that's the next thing we're going to do so with that in mind let's go to the uv editing tab and you'll see that the the screen splits in two and this is allow you to see your your model and also your uv layout so once again let's change the uh viewport shading mode to shade it and we can see what's going on here i'm going to hit numpad 1 and that's going to take us to a nice orthographic front viewport to work from so in edit mode again if i press a it's going to grab all of the faces so in some apps it's shift in a in blender it is a and that just selects all the faces and you can see here on the layout over here how we've inherited the original primitives uv mapping and that's not we want what what we want in that in this particular case so what i'd like to do here is i would like to go to uv i would like to go to unwrap and just hit unwrap and you can see that has made a single island that kind of more closely resembles what we've got going on in our viewport so the next thing to do is to go to the rotate tab here and just rotate this into position so that what we have in the viewport matches what we have over here and this is one of the benefits about working at very low resolution until you need it um for kind of vertex by vertex work like this it's really useful so let's go ahead and just non-uniformly scale this in and then once i'm happy with that placement what i can do is i can just start moving these about kind of vertex by vertex because this is looking better than it was before but it's still not quite right okay so i can marquee select here around the vertex and i'm just going to move these around into something that is is nicer mapping here and what i want to do is i want to keep these inside the silhouette we don't really want to have any verts out there and that's just because you know it's darker and it could cause a bit of unpred predictability when it comes to displacement so i'm just kind of going to grab groups of these i want to make sure that the top of the egg has a nice bit of detail here and because this is kind of organic as well um you know there are going to be areas that aren't symmetrical and we kind of want that it's a bit more realistic than having something that's perfectly symmetrical so we're going to keep as much of that as we can i'm going to pull these words down here in the uvs just to make sure get some of this nice biomechanical detail kind of on the underside of the of the egg there and all the time we have to remember that you know each vertex is connected and that moving one can affect another okay something like that seems to be pretty good i think that's going to be fine um all right so let's call the uvs done let's just examine them here yeah no crazy stretching going on i think that's fine okay great so let's call that our uvs done for now so now we're now we're in a better position to uh load in the rest of our textures and actually do some shading so let's go to the shading tab up here now and you can see we've got this nice um hdri environment that's you know shading our kind of surface here which is which is great but before i do that i want to mirror this back to the other side so we've done the work on this side want a mirror to the other side let's try that out next so to do that we can go to the modifiers tab which is the blue spanner over here click in add modifier and the modifier we want is mirror which is here okay now you might have seen the viewport view port pop a little bit there but nothing really seems to have happened and that's just the mirror axis we need to change the mirror access so if i turn off x and turn on y you will see that it restores the rest of the sphere and now we have something that's a little more egg shaped with some detail on there okay cool so i'm going to click on this drop down and hit apply and that is going to clear our modifier stack here and leave us ready so i'm going to hit numpad 1 again here and what i want to do here is i want to go into edit mode and i just want to restore the shape of the egg a little bit because we've we've lost that in our creation so far so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab this vert at the top press t if it's not there already to bring up this kind of transform toolbar and just pull these up a little bit and be careful when you're making selections here because i think by default backface selection is turned off in blender so just hit shift and add to that selection and also kind of pull that up a little bit and i also want to just use the scale tool here to pull those in a little and get a bit more of the egg shape back we could probably do some around this edge loop too okay you know what that's going to be absolutely fine okay so the next thing then is to add a little bit of curviness back into our model let's go back up to object mode let's go over to modifiers here and the modifier we want is subdivision surface and you can see when we add the subdivision surface how we get this kind of smoother outline now i'm going to go hard with the subdivisions here i'm going to go up take it up to maybe 4 for now and if you want to see how that has affected the wireframe underneath you can go into wireframe here and you can turn off optimal display in the modifier and you can see that we have a lot more faces to work with than we did before i'm actually going to go up another level here okay so that will help us when it comes to the displacement what you'll also notice from shaded view here is that um we have a material on the bottom so it's a split screen this is your 3d viewport with your world lighting and this is the actual material that has been created and this is where we're going to change the surface properties make it a little bit shinier a little bit ickier kind of stickier looking and also load in our normal map in a little while so before we get to that let's go ahead and do some displacement on this so again in the modifiers tab over here the blue spanner let's go to add modifier and the modifier we want to add this time is displace and you'll see that our object just grew in the viewport and that's okay it's the there's a non uh or there's a uniform displace rather being applied and we want to control that with the displacement map that we had from shader map so if you hit new and then this little slider panel over here it will take us to the texture tab and then we have the option of making a new one or opening an existing one let's go ahead and open an existing one and it is the displacement map from shader map that we want to load in here so let's hit open image and you can see there's something going on in our viewport here definitely no longer egg shapes but it also doesn't seem to correspond to what we've done so what we want to do is go back here to the modifier tab change the coordinates to uv and that's going to tell the displacement map to use the same coordinates as the albedo that we've already loaded on now as you can see it conforms a bit more to what we might expect but there's some pretty crazy stuff going on there something we can do to kind of mitigate this a little bit is change the color space of the displacement map and color management is kind of beyond the scope of this video but let's just see if it makes a difference in this in this instance so go back down here to the texture tab and you will see that the color space is s or gb and i'm not sure what blender should use for this i'm going to go with linear even though it's not a proper displacement map you know it's just been generated from you know an 8-bit input okay let's go back here you can see that it's changed again and now let's just bring the strength down to maybe something like i don't know 0.25 and see how that looks that's not too bad um we can change the mid level then and see and i actually prefer the mid level is down lower because it it keeps more of the egg shape there you know and you can see at the top it's becoming it's not as round as it might be and that's just because of the displacement information that's in there but that there is easy enough to correct as well and that's something that we could spend some time doing now because these modifiers are in a stack i can kind of change them independently so if i increase the levels up here in the subdivision modifier to six we get a little bit more detail in there and if you want to see exactly what's happening on the model it's pretty easy just to flip over to the sculpting tab and you can see the kind of results that you're getting which is super useful it's also really cool to just add some more detail and definition or remove some even in this mode and if you want to do that go back to shading here for a second i'm going to use the drop down on subdivision to apply it and use the drop down on the displacement to apply it as well and now in here in the sculpting tab you should be able to sculpt directly on the model and this is really where it's worth spending some time um you can really really bring out details and really enhance those kind of rib cages and stuff so let me see let me grab what will i use i'll grab um the crease brush that's quite nice i'm gonna undo that gonna go over here to stroke um i'm gonna turn on stabilize stroke because i'm working with a mouse um and i'm going to turn on symmetry as well and we can use symmetry on x and y and whatever i do here just to try and you know just enhance these areas a little bit just tighten up some of the some of the curves that will be repeated on this side and the other which is super useful as you're adding or subtracting from these areas you know with the same brush you can hold ctrl and it will have the opposite effect so if by default it kind of bulges out if you hold control you can push in and it's really useful to just enhance some of these areas because some of them are quite flat because of the displacement that we use so sometimes it's it's really nice just to push them in a little bit and it can be quite easy um to get those giga-esque curves and shapes in there sometimes working out and maybe even smoothing if you hold shift you can smooth areas um and just kind of enhancing what we have here already okay let's call that done so let's go back to shading and take a look and you can kind of see a little bit we you know we could we could use some work in here just to make those a little bit more pronounced but it's looking pretty good so next up let's bring in our normal map okay and this is the uh the material that we're using so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go to add i'm going to go to texture i'm going to go to image texture there we go once we have the image texture node we can choose to open and once again i'm going to choose my normal map and i know at normal maps the color space for normal maps um should be um non-color because it is information about the surface it's not necessarily you know um correct hues and stuff we're thinking about so the next thing i want to add is a vector and it is a normal map vector okay so let's take the color from our texture and plug it into the color of the normal map and then take this normal output and plug it in here okay so we can change the strength then of the effect of the normal by moving this spinner back and forth we don't want it too heavy just enough to bring some of that nice detail in okay just have examined this from all angles it's still a little bit matte looking so why don't we go ahead and we can add some roughness so i'm just going to use a value for this you can see bring the roughness down we start to get more of a sheen on here starting to pick up the environment a little bit more starting to look a little bit more slimy and icky and that can be controlled with textures too let's just see what happens when i plug in the color map into roughness so because this is brighter it's more rough and these darker areas in here are getting more of the environment reflected uh what else do we have so if you want to make it look a bit more organic i think that a really good way of doing that is um to use some subsurface scattering especially on these exposed ribs here and it'll just make the whole thing look like it has been you know maybe formed as as liquid or gel and grown and kind of evolved organically so here we have the subsurface up here and i'm going to choose a color for subsurface that is kind of i don't know kind of brownish i guess or or or kind of um yeah bonus is the color i want for it i guess um and let's dial up the subsurface here you can see you can go really high with this and it looks like it's made of resin or jelly or something like like that but we just want to give enough subsurface that there's a hint of organics in here and this will help as well if we go to the lighting in the scene here and just maybe really amp this up and we can see it starting to come through a little bit higher with this maybe change the amount of of world strength so we get a little bit more contrast in here i would like to add a ground plane so our object has something to sit on and we can improve the viewport here a little as well over in the ev settings here let's turn on ambient occlusion let's turn on bloom it's a little high let's turn on screen space reflections and you can see that the ground starts to be reflected in our in our egg here let's check the shadows if we see if we can do something about that jagged edge let's change the cube size upwards here and see if some of that gets smoothed out not bad and then lastly i think i'd just like to add a little bit of a rim light along here just to pop the alien faberge egg off from its background so once again i'm going to hit shift and a i'm going to go down here to lights and choose a spotlight maybe let's rotate this into position going to maybe give it a cooler color something like that rotate it so that it just hits at an angle here something like that so that is how to take an ai generated image into full 3d using free tools if anybody wants the blend file or the textures that i use to create this they will be available on my gum road at a link in the description thanks for watching

Channel: Game Art Experiments

Views: 182,260

Keywords: 3d, game, gameart, material, shader, model, texture, real, time, realtime, gamedev, ai, midjourney, dall-e 2, generator, print, stl, alien, giger, faberge, egg, 2D to 3D, convert, conversion, blender, blend, 3d printing

Id: RztJGuhC5so

Length: 28min 24sec (1704 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022