The AI is weak! Zero AI open source procedural 3D environment generation artifact is here!

**Source:**CG World

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool, style model (Meng Ya Xinghe)

In this era of artificial intelligence "ruling the king", AI can be said to be everywhere. When it comes to generating pictures and videos, when everyone turns their attention to AI, there are still some people who are "going against the current"~

Recently, researchers from the Vision and Learning Laboratory of Princeton University brought a new artifact they developed: Infinigen, a free open source programmatic 3D environment generation tool that can generate a 3D environment according to a set of program rules, including terrain, vegetation and creatures.

Infinigen was developed as part of the research paper "Using Programmatic Generation of Infinitely Realistic Worlds", based on Blender, can be compiled and used from source code, and can be exported in any format supported by Blender (including FBX, Alembic and USD) for use in other DCC applications programs or game engines.

Most notably, Infinigen is "based solely on mathematical rules", every asset from shape to texture is generated from scratch with randomized mathematical rules (users have full control over asset generation by overriding randomized default parameters), no Rely on any external assets, allowing unlimited variations and combinations, resulting in 3D scenes that closely resemble the natural world.

In other words, with Infinigen, infinite 3D worlds can be generated without artificial intelligence!

It modifies Blender basic primitives into environment assets through a procedural rule library. These rules are organized into prefab generators of different asset types, covering a large number of objects and scenes in the natural world: including terrain generators, vegetation (and vegetation-like underwater objects such as coral) spawners, and even mob spawners that can spawn predators, herbivores, birds, beetles, and fish. Over time the future will also cover the built environment and man-made objects.

Infinigen can generate "high-quality" animation rigs; and generate hair, and automatically comb it; it can even simulate the folding and wrinkling of skin through cloth simulation, and has 50 procedural material generators for generating textures.

Features and functions

Real Geometry

Infinigen is optimized for computer vision research, especially 3D vision. No use of bump/normal maps, full transparency or other techniques to fake geometry details, all geometry details are real to ensure accurate 3D ground truth.

Environments are generated as full geometry, but since details are not "falsified", they may need to be optimized first if they are to be used for recreational work.

Generate 3D geometry and support rendering and data pipeline

Infinigen can generate a range of rendering passes, including depth, surface normals, and hidden mask-style "panoramic segmentation," as well as data passes such as optical flow and 3D scene flow.

An integrated transpiler can also convert the underlying Blender node graph to Python code.

Combine generated assets into full 3D environments from mountains to ocean

Infinigen includes a scatter generator that distributes assets over terrain to create complete 3D environments.

The system simulates dynamic water using FLIP simulation, sun and sky lighting using a Nishita sky model implemented in Blender, and weather effects using Blender's particle system.

According to the instructions in the GitHub repository, generating environments is done via the command line, controlling the type of environment generated with flags. Infinigen ran the benchmark on a fairly high-end system (with two Intel Xeon Silver 4114 server CPUs and an Nvidia GPU), so it may be a while before it's complete.

※The standard test command shown on GitHub "takes about 10 minutes and 16GB of memory to execute on an M1 Mac".

The initial version of Infinigen is primarily for computer vision research, but the researchers say that in the future they intend to make Infinigen a flexible project through open-source collaboration with the entire community. Judging from the planning roadmap published on the official website, the initial pre-generated data will be released at the end of July.

License and System Requirements

Infinigen is available under the 3-clause BSD license. But since currently the GitHub repository does not provide compiled binaries, it needs to be compiled from source.

Tested on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux and macOS 12+, currently requires an Apple Silicon or Nvidia GPU, plans to support AMD GPUs in the future.

Windows users are recommended to use WSL to set up an Ubuntu terminal environment on a Windows machine (WSL is compatible with Windows 10+).

Well, that’s all for today’s introduction, see you guys tomorrow~

Refer to the original text

Infinigen: a free generator for procedural 3D environments | CG Channel

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