I Turned Ugly Low-Poly Blocks Into INSANE 3D Sculpts With AI (Hi3D v1.0 REAL Test)

I made five ugly, blocky 3D models in Blender (a sword, a robot, a helmet, a building ornament and a dragon) and ran them through Hi3D v1.0, an open-source AI that refines a rough 3D model using a reference image. The Hugging Face demo refused to run for me (GPU quota), so I rented an A100 80GB and ran all five models at all three levels: 512, 1024 and 1536. Real numbers, real renders. What I found: - It adds real surface detail: carved ornament, scales, panel lines, rivets, engraved borders. - It follows YOUR rough shape: my sphere-like helmet stayed a sphere. It decorates, it does not redesign. - Geometry only: no textures, no colors, no materials. - Output looks capped at about 1M faces (levels 512/1024) and 2M faces (level 1536). - Top level took up to about 8 minutes per model and up to 35 GB of peak GPU memory (PyTorch count) in my run. My results (seconds per run, A100 80GB, 25 steps, seed 0; peak memory at 1536 in brackets): Model | coarse tris | 512 | 1024 | 1536 Sword | 138 | 15s | 94s | 56s (12 GB) Robot | 368 | 22s | 91s | 253s (22 GB) Helmet | 336 | 58s | 268s | 480s (30 GB) Ornament | 270 | 32s | 144s | 492s (35 GB) Dragon | 414 | 16s | 50s | 114s (15 GB) Chapters: 0:00 Five ugly blocks and an AI 0:21 What Hi3D v1.0 actually is 1:40 Can my 8GB laptop run it? (the Space says no) 2:35 Renting an A100 and setting it up 2:54 The five rough models 3:19 Sword: 138 triangles to 1.5 million faces 3:42 Robot 4:06 Helmet: the big lesson 4:59 Building ornament: the best result 5:39 Dragon 5:58 Timings, memory and face counts 6:43 Honest limits and the license 7:34 Who it is for, and what it cost 8:03 Verdict I rented the A100 on RunPod: https://get.runpod.io/pe48 Hi3D v1.0 links: Model + weights: https://huggingface.co/hi3d-official/Hi3Dv1.0 Code: https://github.com/hi3d-official/Hi3Dv1.0 Demo Space: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hugging-apps/hi3dv1 Notes: The narration is my cloned AI voice, and the reference pictures and B-roll stills are AI-generated. The five rough models were made by me in Blender. Hi3D is released under the Hi3D Open License Agreement v1.0 (commercial use allowed with conditions, read it before shipping anything). I only tested the default 25 steps and seed 0, and I did not test the CPU-offload mode. Get GPUs Runpod: https://get.runpod.io/pe48 Get Hostinger: https://www.hostg.xyz/SHJiu Coupon Code "PROMPT" 10% discount 🔗 Connect with me: Email → [email protected] Ko-fi → https://ko-fi.com/promptengineer Patreon → https://www.patreon.com/PromptEngineer975 Book a Call → https://calendly.com/prompt-engineer48/call GitHub → https://github.com/PromptEngineer48 Twitter/X → https://twitter.com/prompt48 Website → https://promptengineer48.com/