404-GEN today announced it has become the first decentralized 3D model generation platform to integrate with Unity.
The integration with Unity, platform to create and grow games and interactive experiences, enables developers or even players to generate models directly from the Bittensor mainnet within the Unity environment. The company targets next-gen content creators, not necessarily professionals, to bring their creative ideas to life.
“These people are not necessarily professionals or working in triple-A environments, but they still have very creative ideas. I want to bring those to life, and that’s really what we’re trying to do,” said Ben James, CEO of 404-GEN, a startup based in Switzerland, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Now available as a Verified Solution in the Unity Asset Store, this integration introduces a new form of 3D representation based on Gaussian Splatting, a technique that brings decentralized content creation to Unity users, James said.
As you can see from the images, Gaussian Splatts take a scan of an area and then generate a point cloud that can reproduce the place in 3D. It’s a computer graphics technique that creates photorealistic 3D scenes from a set of images or videos. It does so by using blending millions of tiny, translucent ellipsoids (Gaussian splats) to reproduce the scene. These splats — often used in reconstructing digital twins of real places — have data about the position, color, size, and transparency, which blend together to create a realistic 3D model.
Unity’s technical team rigorously evaluated the 404-Gen technology and recommended several enhancements, most notably flagging redeveloping certain AI dependencies to ensure commercial viability of the produced models.
In addition to these improvements, 404-GEN introduced a “digital handshake” to streamline both the creative and legal processes for developers, ensuring that models generated by decentralized miners are ready for commercial use. These improvements not only refine the technical framework but also facilitate a more seamless, one-click integration, making it accessible to developers across various skill levels.
“This integration is an important step for our ecosystem. It enables creators to work directly with decentralized 3D generation tools within the Unity editor, leveling the playing field for independent developers and designers,” said Ben James, founder of 404-GEN, in a statement. “Our technology bridges traditional game development and decentralized networks, offering a practical solution that meets the commercial standards expected in the industry.”
The company has nine employees.
By lowering technical barriers, the 404-GEN integration promotes experimentation with innovative 3D modeling techniques. This move highlights a growing openness among established Web2 companies to collaborate with decentralized subnets on Bittensor, ultimately broadening creative opportunities in game development and digital design.
Origins
The 404 name comes from the error when you hit a bad website. James was a fan of crypto and he got excited about the space. He read white papers and thought about how to incentivize different parties in a blockchain network the right way. And he thought of using the tech to democratize content creation.
James founded 404-GEN a couple of years ago with a focus on 3D imagery and AI. There are other competitors out there, but James believes the company is unique because of its decentralized model.
“When we generate 3d models, actually the code that we write as a company is really code that’s oriented around choosing the best 3D model for a particular prompt, whether it’s an image or a text prompt, in real time, algorithmically, so, using things like visual language models or different types of multimodal models to do that,” he said. “That means that there’s no one size fit all fits all solution here. There is no single foundation model, but, rather, what we rely on is the community of building on top of open source models. These are state of the art open source models in order to find the best solutions depending on what a particular user is looking for.”
The company is also unique in its focus on Gaussian Splats to do the 3D representation. The firm has nine employees now.
“We think that especially within the AI and the machine learning spaces, this has a tremendous potential trajectory, and within the gaming industry, it would allow things like lightweight three assets, so you can have more unique assets in a single scene,” James said. “You can convert them into meshes, which is the industry standard. But everything we generate is generated as a Gaussian splat.”
James said the decentralized nature of the platform allows for real-time, algorithmic generation of 3D models using visual language models and multimodal models. The company relies on a community of builders contributing to open-source models to find the best solutions for users.
With the decentralized model, the user’s prompts are sent off to miners in the ecosystem, and they generate multiple competing models. The company uses algorithms to choose the best model for the user, and high-quality models that are not selected are saved in an open-source dataset. The company incentivizes the miners with tokens, with the highest reward going to the one with the best results.
While the company is producing high-quality work, James believes that AI should augment the intuition of designers and artists, making their roles more creative.
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