CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets
Longwen Zhang1,2* Ziyu Wang1,2* Qixuan Zhang1,2+ Qiwei Qiu1,2 Anqi Pang1 Haoran Jiang1,2 Wei Yang3 Lan Xu1# Jingyi Yu1#
1ShanghaiTech University 2Deemos Technology 3Huazhong University of Science and Technology
*Equal contributions. +Project leader. #Corresponding author.
SIGGRAPH 2024 Journal & Real-time Live!
Technical Papers Awards: Honorable Mentions🎉🎉🎉
Abstract
In the realm of digital creativity, our potential to craft intricate 3D worlds from imagination is often hampered by the limitations of existing digital tools, which demand extensive expertise and efforts. To narrow this disparity, we introduce CLAY, a 3D geometry and material generator designed to effortlessly transform human imagination into intricate 3D digital structures. CLAY supports classic text or image inputs as well as 3D-aware controls from diverse primitives (multi-view images, voxels, bounding boxes, point clouds, implicit representations, etc). At its core is a large-scale generative model composed of a multi-resolution Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and a minimalistic latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT), to extract rich 3D priors directly from a diverse range of 3D geometries. Specifically, it adopts neural fields to represent continuous and complete surfaces and uses a geometry generative module with pure transformer blocks in latent space. We present a progressive training scheme to train CLAY on an ultra large 3D model dataset obtained through a carefully designed processing pipeline, resulting in a 3D native geometry generator with 1.5 billion parameters. For appearance generation, CLAY sets out to produce physically-based rendering (PBR) textures by employing a multi-view material diffusion model that can generate 2K resolution textures with diffuse, roughness, and metallic modalities. We demonstrate using CLAY for a range of controllable 3D asset creations, from sketchy conceptual designs to production ready assets with intricate details. Even first time users can easily use CLAY to bring their vivid 3D imaginations to life, unleashing unlimited creativity.
Overview
An overview of our CLAY framework for 3D generation. Central to the framework is a large generative model trained on extensive 3D data, capable of transforming textual descriptions into detailed 3D geometries. The model is further enhanced by physically-based material generation and versatile modal adaptation, to enable the creation of 3D assets from diverse concepts and ensure their realistic rendering in digital environments.
Results
Evolution of human innovation, from primitive tools and cultural artifacts to modern electronics and futuristic imaginings, generated by CLAY.
Sample creations using CLAY, with conditions marked in sky blue and input geometries for respective conditioning (if available) in sandy brown.
Citation
@article{zhang2024clay,
title={CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets},
author={Zhang, Longwen and Wang, Ziyu and Zhang, Qixuan and Qiu, Qiwei and Pang, Anqi and Jiang, Haoran and Yang, Wei and Xu, Lan and Yu, Jingyi},
journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
volume={43},
number={4},
pages={1--20},
year={2024},
publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA}
}
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