3D Wizard using AI+Spline

Process

• Generating a satisfying "3D low-poly" wizard shot using Midjourney, and that had similarities with my overall look

• Sculpting on Spline, using as little polygons as possible

• Texturing

• Environment effects (light, background, shadows, bloom etc…)

• Adding interactions and animations using Spline physics, states and transitions

• Optimizing export

PS : Something I didn't realize and didn't show in Spline performance test is the impact of using MatCap textures on material -> it's heavy on the GPU, and adds a lot of data to download.
After removing all MatCap textures, my scene went from 1.1mb to 126ko and drastically reduced GPU usage to a bearable point.

Thoughts after experiment

Pros:

• Simple to get your hands-on 3D for the web, qualitative interface

• Great tutorials

• Lots of possible web interactions (dragging, look at event, following cursor, responsive etc…)

• Lots of export formats (Web, 3D, AR, iOS, Android…)

Cons:

• A bit pricy (around 30$/month)

• Few minor bugs (mainly lags, sometimes freezes)

• Resource-demanding especially for tablets and phones, even if my 3D scene is pretty light (125kb), because spline needs to download mandatory packages of about 1,5mb on the first run.

I see a lot of great 3D content posted on social media made on Spline, but only very few of them are actually running smoothly online for most devices. Still, it's a very promising tool when you carefully craft your scene, and can give a lot of interactivity and playfulness to your website.

Step by step evolution

The model I generated:

And the evolution: