Similar Articles
CRM vs. Rodin Gen 1 : Exploring the New Frontier in 3D Modeling 🗻
6/2/2025
A glance to Rodin Gen-1.5
6/2/2025
Rodin Gen-1, the best 3D Generation AI ?
6/2/2025
Your Own Personal Jarvis (or maybe just a Smart Teacup): Building a Local, Private LLM
6/18/2025
Mastering Midjourney's New CREF Option with NIJI: A Persistent Revolution 🌈✨
6/2/2025
Hi3DGen vs Hunyuan 3D-2.5
The AI race for 3D model generation just got intense.
Looking to turn a single image—or a few words—into a clean, printable, textured 3D model?
Welcome to 2025, where AI now creates your assets faster than your art team can schedule a standup.
Two names dominate this new frontier: Hi3DGen (ByteDance) and Hunyuan 3D-2.5 (Tencent).
One focuses on geometry and fidelity, the other on full textured pipelines. Both are wild.
🧠 Hi3DGen: Geometry-first, Texture-free, Detail-obsessed
Hi3DGen is a research model from ByteDance’s Stable-X team.
It uses a normal prediction stage, then feeds that into a latent diffusion model to reconstruct precise 3D geometry.
No textures. No fancy PBRs. Just crispy edges, top-notch normals, and clean topology.
If you care about printable, sculptable, or high-fidelity meshes, this is the one.
➡️ Try the online demo (HuggingFace)
📢 Full code will be open-sourced in April 2025
🧱 Hunyuan 3D-2.5: From prompt to textured model in 20 seconds
Hunyuan is Tencent’s all-in-one 3D generator. Input a text prompt or an image, get a fully textured 3D model with PBR maps, normals, and UVs. It even supports stylized characters.
The pipeline:
- Geometry: Hunyuan3D-DiT (Diffusion Transformer)
- Textures: Hunyuan3D-Paint
- Output: .obj/.gltf with 1024x1024 textures, AO maps, normals, and UVs
Perfect for:
- Game prototyping
- Virtual product design
- Fast concept-to-asset workflows
➡️ Try the official demo (limited free trials)
🧠 Code repo (Apache 2.0)
Note: Not available from the EU (regulatory restrictions)
🧪 Which one should you use?
If you want clean, accurate geometry for printing, sculpting, or manual texturing: Hi3DGen.
If you want an all-in-one asset (textures + UV + ready for Unity/Blender): Hunyuan 3D-2.5.
Hi3DGen feels like an artist’s base mesh assistant.
Hunyuan feels like a game dev intern on crack. (In a good way.)
🧰 Already used in production?
Yes, and not just by indie hackers.
- Tencent Games uses Hunyuan internally for prototyping and concept assets
- ByteDance’s Stable-X team collaborated with VFX artists to optimize mesh fidelity
- Artists on Reddit and HuggingFace are already posting high-detail busts and figurines from Hi3DGen
A few models have even been 3D printed already, and the results are surprisingly clean.
🛠️ Roadmap & Next Versions
- Hi3DGen will be open-source in April 2025. Textured variant rumored.
- Hunyuan v3.0 incoming (Summer): simplified topology, rigging-friendly output, GLB export.
- Plugins for Blender & Unity under development.
- Meta & OpenAI are working on video-to-3D—expect chaos soon.
✨ Bonus: Other notable contenders
- Rodin (Gen 1.5)
Not public, but in private tests. Excellent surface quality.
-
Trellis
Academic image-to-3D, slower and less detailed than Hi3DGen, but stable. -
CLAY
Focused on stylized characters, popular in animation pipelines.
🏁 Final Thoughts
In 2025, AI 3D gen isn’t science fiction anymore—it’s a tool.
Hi3DGen and Hunyuan aren’t just toys—they’re actual weapons in the hands of developers and artists.
Your choice depends on whether you need:
- Raw fidelity with artistic control → Hi3DGen
- Fast, usable assets with textures → Hunyuan 3D-2.5
If you’re not experimenting with these tools yet, you’re already late.