point-e is the official repository for Point-E, a generative model developed by OpenAI that produces 3D point clouds from textual (or image) prompts. Its principal advantage is speed: it can generate 3D assets in just 1–2 minutes on a single GPU, which is significantly faster than many competing text-to-3D models. The model works via a two-stage diffusion approach: first, it uses a text → image diffusion network to produce a synthetic 2D view consistent with the prompt; then a second diffusion model converts that image into a 3D point cloud. While it does not match the fine detail of some slower methods, the tradeoff in speed makes it practical for prototyping and interactive 3D generation. The repository includes inference scripts, utilities for converting point clouds to meshes (e.g. via signed distance function regression), sample notebooks, and weight checkpoints. It also provides documentation on limitations, usage instructions, and example outputs.
Features
- Text / image → 3D point cloud generation via diffusion
- Two-stage architecture: text → image, then image → point cloud
- Utilities to convert point clouds to mesh via implicit function regression
- Example notebooks and scripts for inference and visualization
- Pretrained checkpoints for rapid prototyping
- Documentation of limitations and tradeoffs (e.g. resolution vs speed)