3D print people figures

[philipy]

Just for Rik, I even managed to get Meshy to add a pocket watch chain to one of the figures!

I've been meaning to ask, when you say, "Meshy to add", did you mean that somehow you managed to make alterations to the model within Meshy itself? I've tried to do that but couldn't find a way to modify what had been uploaded from outside.

[Durley]

Just for Rik, I even managed to get Meshy to add a pocket watch chain to one of the figures!

I've been meaning to ask, when you say, "Meshy to add", did you mean that somehow you managed to make alterations to the model within Meshy itself? I've tried to do that but couldn't find a way to modify what had been uploaded from outside.

No, nothing that clever Phil. I just used the ‘retry’ function until what I wanted appeared. It’s a bit hit and miss to be honest but you get 4 free retries on the pro subscription. It is a stick or twist situation - you loose the previous model if you retry, so if a model worth keeping is generated, I download the STL before hitting ‘retry’.

[philipy]

[philipy]

I have been having some very similar chat bot conversations Phil!

Another thing I tried was to add a photo of someone in the pose I wanted and ask Gemini to e.g. ‘put the Edwardian figure in this pose’, which (mostly) has worked. You could even take a photo of yourself in the pose.

Prompt ‘engineering’ is likely to become a more and more useful skill as AI applications evolve. To be honest, it’s not that much different to instructing a real person to do something, requiring unambiguous requests to get the best outputs. However, unlike a real person, the AI doesn’t generally get upset/defensive/angry when you tell the AI it has got something wrong!

Well, I've beaten Gemini, it's given up on my problem!
All I want is to generate male figures without 'manspreading' so that they can fill a carriage bench seat, but it can't do it. Apparently that spreading pose is so deeply ingrained in its internal definition of 'a seated male' that it overrides all other instructions.
I've spent a large part of this afternoon talking to Gemini and it has been trying to analyse and work around the problem and it can't do it! So a simple Prompt of 'a seated male figure with its knees together', works, but as soon as you try to add any kind of detail, it reverts to manspreading. Gemini even tried using a female figure with all the male clothing detail, which worked, and then changing sex and it went straight back to being spread! It's final suggestion is to create the male figure with spreading, run it through Meshy and then put the stl into Blender and manually correct it!


Edited to add that I've googled for other AI graphics progs,( free ones) and i've tried half a dozen all with the same prompt and they ALL only create seated manspread images. So either they all use the same source material or there is something deeply flawed in the basic AI image generation concept.

[Durley]

Well, I've beaten Gemini, it's given up on my problem!
All I want is to generate male figures without 'manspreading' so that they can fill a carriage bench seat, but it can't do it. Apparently that spreading pose is so deeply ingrained in its internal definition of 'a seated male' that it overrides all other instructions.

I spent yesterday evening trying various was to address this and have come to exactly the same conclusion Phil. I think the reason is the images Gemini’s image creation model are trained on don’t show many examples of men sitting with their knees together. Gemini won’t have learnt what that looks like or how to compose a new image. To illustrate the point, do a plain Google image search of ‘male sitting’ there are thousands of results returned, none of which I could see showed a man in the sitting pose you are after. The Google image search is representative of the data that Gemini would have been trained with. If it’s not seen enough images in that pose to relate prompts associated with ‘male’ and ‘sitting’ it struggles to recreate a new image.

There is an articulation function in Meshy that I’ve not got my head around yet. I wonder if that might help by allowing generated 3D models to be repositioned into alternative poses.

[ge_rik]

There is an articulation function in Meshy that I’ve not got my head around yet. I wonder if that might help by allowing generated 3D models to be repositioned into alternative poses.

Really interesting. I wonder why so many images of men are spreading their legs.

If recall correctly, Philip has a tutorial on here somewhere on reposing figures in Meshy.

Rik

[philipy]

If recall correctly, Philip has a tutorial on here somewhere on reposing figures in Meshy.

Not quite Rik, unfortunately. It was reposing figures in Blender not Meshy.
If I follow Gemini's suggestion, which i think I may have to, then its a matter of importing the Meshy stl into Blender, going through the exercise of rigging it and then moving the legs closer together and re-exporting the stl. Then putting it into Chitubox as normal.
Alternatively i could simply print, 'cut 'n shut', and get the filler out! I'm not sure which would be quicker but going the Blender route i would at least have repeatable stl's.

[philipy]

There is an articulation function in Meshy that I’ve not got my head around yet. I wonder if that might help by allowing generated 3D models to be repositioned into alternative poses.

Thats an interesting thought. I've seen it and had a giggle at some of the weird animations it can produce, but not looked into any detail.

[Durley]

Really interesting. I wonder why so many images of men are spreading their legs.

I think it is just a reflection of the pose males tend to adopt. At least it is the pose of most males who have had their photo taken and it being uploaded to internet. Even searching Edwardian Gentleman Sitting as a Google image search returns lots of manspreading, so I don’t think it is a modern phenomenon!

[philipy]

Really interesting. I wonder why so many images of men are spreading their legs.

I think it is just a reflection of the pose males tend to adopt. At least it is the pose of most males who have had their photo taken and it being uploaded to internet. Even searching Edwardian Gentleman Sitting as a Google image search returns lots of manspreading, so I don’t think it is a modern phenomenon!

Whilst searching for an answer to my problem ( OooH Betty!!) yesterday, I did see something about it being to do with the mechanics of male anatomy around the hips/pelvis, plus certain other parts of the male anatomy making it more comfortable to sit like that.

[Durley]

Legs crossed or manspread seems to be it. I’ve even been observing my colleagues in the office (carefully to avoid being called in by HR) and have seen no male sitting knees together. The lengths we go to for scale authenticity…

[philipy]

( Quickly moving my knees apart )...Gemini stopped accepting my instructions a couple of hours ago. It said "Continue with Google AI Pro
You've reached your limit on 2.5 Pro until 26 Sept, 13:26. Try Google AI Pro for higher limits."
However it is now 13-30 and it still won't let me type anything.

[Paul_in_Ricky]

However it is now 13-30 and it still won't let me type anything.

You're in a different time zone
I've come across this with other AI agents; Chat GPt, Claude etc. Very frustrating and you would expect AI to be able to work out what time zone you're imputing from.


In the real world;
I've just finished printing one of Dursley's loco crewman and it looks amazing. Photo to follow when I've finished getting the supports off. The back of the coat is a particular problem because of the level of detail. I think I'd take some time to fill in the gap between coat and body if I were to print another one.

[philipy]

Thanks Paul. I should have thought of it myself, given that the dates are back-to-front US style!

Anyway, whilst I'm waiting, I've just bitten the bullet and invoked Plan A. I've taken a 1 month sub to Meshy Pro, which gives access to the V6 downloads and I've downloaded the 18 stl's that I've amassed over last couple of days.
Cost for the 50% discounted 1 month sub was £8.52, which of course works out at 47p each - I can live with that!

[Paul_in_Ricky]

Can you easily drop the subscription or is there a minimum term ?

[philipy]

Paul,
I signed up ( and paid) for a monthly plan and it says you can cancel at any time. Its cheaper if you sign up for 3 months or yearly, but for the occasional use, personally I can't justify that.
They are currently doing a 50% reduction for the first month so that knocked it down from 16 to 8 for the first month. which runs from 26th Sept ( today) to 27th Oct. My plan is to cancel somewhere around 22/23rd.
They are also doing various promotions to give you credits for use on new models, my balance atm is 1180. Not quite sure why its that high, something to do with how many times I've created things in the past I think, but that is equivalent to 59 models.

[Paul_in_Ricky]

That sounds promising. Maybe make lots in 6 before joining, then grab them all and resign

[philipy]

Yup, that's exactly what I did... and why I downloaded 18 stl's in the first half hour of joining! Even if I never print half of them, I've got them in my archive on a memory stick at a fraction of the cost of buying from Cults or wherever.

[Paul_in_Ricky]

As promised photos;
Dursley's figures printed at 0.06 layer height with 0.2mm nozzle with Sunlu PLA+2 filament.

Not great photos with the exposure pushed to show the detail. The black, slightly glossy, filament shows up layers more than a matt filament would. The white marks are where supports have been cut off, but there's room for improvement on that. I hope that when painted many of the flaws are a lot less obvious.

3J1A0854.jpg (319.83 KiB) Viewed 7013 times

3J1A0855.jpg (283.11 KiB) Viewed 7013 times

Thanks again for uploading these files

[Durley]

They’ve come out really well Paul, even better than I would have anticipated from a filament printer.