Two things on these sites came out of generative models rather than a camera or a modelling program: the cat you can walk around in the court, and a handful of still pictures, several of which were later replaced by photographs and two of which are still up on this site's own front page, captioned since 3 September as what they are. What follows is the plain-language version of both. The exact settings, the credit costs and the byte counts are on the deep pages: the Tripo pipeline and making the mesh shippable. The 2D side is on image generation for the site, and what the whole thing cost is on the cost page.
What "generate a 3D model from a photo" means here
You upload a picture of a cat. A model that has been trained on a great many objects and their photographs returns a mesh: a surface made of triangles, wrapped in a colour texture, a normal map that fakes fine surface detail, and a third map that says which parts are shiny. It is a guess about a cat-shaped solid that would produce that photograph. The guess is good enough that the front looks like the photograph. The back is invented, because nothing in the photograph says what the back looks like.
The service used for every model on this project is Tripo, called through its API from a Python script. It is paid in credits, not dollars, and the credits for each task are recorded in the JSON the API returns; the script saves that JSON next to the model. Eight tasks were run between 16 August and 2 September 2026. Five of the resulting files are on the live site.
| File | Made from | Shipped size |
|---|---|---|
helen-sit-v2.glb, the court's cat | one September photo → four generated views → mesh (Tripo, two tasks) | 2.16 MB |
helen-sit-std.glb, the previous cat, still linked | one August photo → mesh (Tripo, one task) | 738 kB |
helen-standing.glb, the fallback pose | two real photos in the front and left slots, back and right left empty (Tripo multiview) | 672 kB |
helen-morse-bust.glb | one cropped historic portrait plus a text prompt (Tripo) | 781 kB |
charles-morse-bust.glb | same | 850 kB |
Every one of those left Tripo between three and thirty times larger than it is now. The shrinking is not a Tripo feature; it is an offline pass with glTF-Transform, and it is where most of the engineering on this page happened. The busts are on the about page; the show site tells its own version of the bust story at build/namesake-gallery.
Who did what
- Take one good photograph Front-on, sitting, well lit, nothing in her mouth. One clean shot beat several mediocre ones, twice.
- Let a model invent the other three sides Tripo's multiview task turns the photo into front, left, back and right views. Ten credits. Keep the four images; they are the only record of what the model guessed.
- Let a second task build the mesh The four views become a textured PBR GLB. Sixty credits, 61.4 MB, two million triangles, three 4096-pixel textures.
- Shrink it for a browser glTF-Transform simplifies to 120,000 triangles, resizes the textures to WebP, and meshopt-compresses the geometry: 2.16 MB.
- Fit it by hand, in code Turn it, measure it, scale it, seat it, dim its materials. The generator knows nothing about the room.
- Look at it as her owner would The check that matters is whether it is Helen. A person answers that; no script on this project scores it.
What it gets wrong
The list below is every fault the repository records, not a survey of the field. Each one cost either credits or a person's time, and the deep pages say how much.
- The tongue. The August photograph caught her mid-lick. The model faithfully baked a pink tongue into the colour texture, and it stayed on the court for ten days before someone repainted about eleven hundred pixels of the texture by hand.
- The colour. Helen is a dilute tortoiseshell: muted grey-brown and apricot with a white blaze. The four views Tripo synthesised are a brighter, more orange cat. The setting that textures the mesh from the original photo rather than from the views is what pulls the colour back.
- The back. With one photo, the far side is a smear. The September model fixed that by paying ten credits for four views first.
- The busts. Asked in the prompt for "head, neck, and upper chest only … no legs, no skirt, no full body", one of the two came back as a standing figure anyway. The court crops it with a clipping plane; the generator never learned.
- Orientation and scale. Every export faces sideways and comes in its own units. The fit code turns each one a quarter turn, measures its bounding box and scales a sitting cat to 0.9 scene units.
- Size. 61.4 MB is not a web asset. Two million triangles and three 4096-pixel JPEGs are what "detailed" means to the generator.
- Regeneration is not a retry. Same photo, same settings, a different cat next time. Keep the output and the task JSON; you cannot get the same one back.
The API calls, the task log and the eight-task timeline are on the Tripo page. The compression pass, the tongue repair and how the result was checked are on the shippable-mesh page. The still pictures, including the ones that were thrown out, are on the site-imagery page. The earlier single-page telling of the cat's story is still here; the room it all lands in is the court build page.