Direct2.5: Diverse Text-to-3D Generation via Multi-view 2.5D Diffusion

Yuanxun Lu, Jingyang Zhang, Shiwei Li, Tian Fang, David McKinnon, Yanghai Tsin, Long Quan, Xun Cao, Yao Yao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 8744-8753

Recent advances in generative AI have unveiled significant potential for the creation of 3D content. However current methods either apply a pre-trained 2D diffusion model with the time-consuming score distillation sampling (SDS) or a direct 3D diffusion model trained on limited 3D data losing generation diversity. In this work we approach the problem by employing a multi-view 2.5D diffusion fine-tuned from a pre-trained 2D diffusion model. The multi-view 2.5D diffusion directly models the structural distribution of 3D data while still maintaining the strong generalization ability of the original 2D diffusion model filling the gap between 2D diffusion-based and direct 3D diffusion-based methods for 3D content generation. During inference multi-view normal maps are generated using the 2.5D diffusion and a novel differentiable rasterization scheme is introduced to fuse the almost consistent multi-view normal maps into a consistent 3D model. We further design a normal-conditioned multi-view image generation module for fast appearance generation given the 3D geometry. Our method is a one-pass diffusion process and does not require any SDS optimization as post-processing. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our direct 2.5D generation with the specially-designed fusion scheme can achieve diverse mode-seeking-free and high-fidelity 3D content generation in only 10 seconds.