Garden Railway Forum

I have a model that is to big for my bed so being lazy I asked an AI bot if it could cut it in half for me and add some holes on the cut faces so I could use aligning dowel pins. I provided the model stl and an stl of a model which uses the dowel pins.
Well the results left a lot to be desired so I gave up.
I am just wondering if somebody on here has successfully done and if so what did they use. I used Claude and chatGPT gave both a big "F" and told them to go back to school and learn how to do it.

Graeme, I know its not exactly what you are talking about but I assume you've seen all the making and painting figures stuff we've been talking about fairly recently? At one point I did ask Gemini about making stl's directly and it said it couldn't do that but recommended using Blender and Meshy instead. - not a great deal of help, but did sort of confirm what we were already doing.
Out of interest I just did a search for, "Are there any freely available ai programs that can generate and edit stl files". I haven't looked at any of them but that search turned up a page full of possibles.
This one sounds as though it could be useful since it talks about remixing which is essentially what you are wanting to do?:

https://blog.printpal.io › how-to-customize-3d-models-with-ai-even-if-you-cant-use-blender

How to Customize 3D Models with AI (Even If You Can't Use Blender)
But now, thanks to AI-powered tools, you can personalize and remix 3D designs without ever opening CAD software. Whether you're a maker, educator, small business owner, or 3D printing enthusiast, this guide will show you how to use PrintPal's Image-to-CAD platform to create custom 3D models in...

I have seen the figures discussions which is why I tried it on some track models.
That's what I am running into as well but trying to get it to do even a simple slice of an stl into 2 parts with aligning tabs seems to be beyond the capability.
To add some "rail extensions onto a diamond crossing I ended up using tinkercad.
Looks like I'm going to learn Solve Space as that is one that works on my older laptop might be better than tinkercad which I had an issue with while working ot 30 degree angles

As Phil says , the general AI agents (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc) can't generate STLs yet.

Frankly, cutting an STL in two and adding alignment pegs is very simple. You could do it in Tinkercad, 3D Build or Blender.

There's a decent tutorial on YouTube for this that uses Blender;

Paul_in_Ricky wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2026 9:52 am As Phil says , the general AI agents (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc) can't generate STLs yet.

Frankly, cutting an STL in two and adding alignment pegs is very simple. You could do it in Tinkercad, 3D Build or Blender.

There's a decent tutorial on YouTube for this that uses Blender;

I keep hearing about this Blender how hard is it for a novice to learn (one who struggles with tinkercad).

As for 3D models from pictures;
I did find Hyper 3D "Rodin" and it produce this for me.
Not a bad render for a quick job from a side shot of my tanker

GAP wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2026 10:24 pmI keep hearing about this Blender how hard is it for a novice to learn (one who struggles with tinkercad).

Tinkercad is a curious bit of software. In some ways it’s the simplest and easiest 3D software to learn, but it’s simplicity and lack of options can also make it tricky for some more advanced design tasks.
Blender has a phenomenal range of options, many of which have no use for 3D model making, and without some sort of tutorial it would be almost impossible to use from scratch. With a good tutorial you ought to be able to copy a process and start to learn about the program and get some benefit from it. You really don’t need to know everything about it for it to be useful.