Tripo bills in credits and the plan behind this account is not written down anywhere on this site, so there is no dollar figure here. There is a credit ledger, a clock, and a comparison with what the alternative would have been for one person with a day job and no Blender. The tasks themselves are itemised on the Tripo page.
| Spent on | Credits | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| The court's cat, September (views + mesh) | 10 + 60 | on the ottoman now |
| The court's cat, August, standard quality | 30 | served for sixteen days; still linked as a download |
| The same photo at detailed quality | 60 | 6.3 MB file, wired for wide screens, never served |
| The standing pose from two real photos | 30 | the fallback if the sitting file fails |
| A first sitting cat from an album frame | 30 | replaced within hours |
| The two Morse busts | 60 + 60 | both on the about page |
| Total, eight tasks | 340 | five files live, three discarded |
| Job | Time | Whose |
|---|---|---|
| View task posted to a packed, committed, shippable September cat | 16 minutes | two Tripo tasks about three minutes of it; the rest the pack script, a look, and a commit |
| Each August generation, upload to download | 2 to 5 minutes | Tripo |
| Writing the Tripo scripts, the two pack scripts and the fit code | not clocked; the notes are dated 22 and 23 August | a coding assistant in the repository, a person reading and deciding |
| The tongue repair | 30 minutes | a person, with two twenty-line throwaway tools |
| The KTX2 experiment, run and rejected | not clocked; one header comment survives | a person looking at fur |
| Judging each candidate against the twelve checks | minutes per candidate, repeatedly | a person, every time |
Where generation won
The cat exists. The first argument stops there, and it is a strong one. A walk-around, textured, sit-posed likeness of a specific cat is a week's work for someone who knows Blender and can sculpt fur, and the operator is not that person and was not going to become one for a cat. Seventy credits and three minutes produced a mesh that passes the only check that matters to her owner, after the fit and the pack. The fallback had been a procedural figurine built from tapered tubes and a painted patch map; it looked like a nice toy.
The busts are the second win. Two historic photographs of two real people became sculptures in an afternoon for 120 credits, and the flaw in one of them, a whole figure where a bust was asked for, was fixed with one clipping plane and one number. Commissioning two busts would have been a different order of cost and would have taken longer than the entire site did.
The four synthetic views are the third and the cheapest. Ten credits bought a back for the cat. There is no manual equivalent short of photographing her from behind, which anyone who has tried to photograph a cat from a chosen angle will understand is not a manual equivalent.
Where it did not
Three of the eight tasks were discarded, 120 of the 340 credits. One was an album frame that produced a cat nobody kept. One was a higher-quality version of a file that already looked right, generated on the theory that wide screens deserved more and never served because the standard file was enough. Generation is cheap enough that trying is the default, and cheap enough that the discards do not sting; they are recorded here because a page that only lists the successes is advertising.
On the 2D side the record is worse. The channel kit's generated cat cost a day of design work to replace, and the court's rear-wall portraits are being replaced now. Both were rejected for the same reason: they were competent pictures of some other cat. The generated still that has stayed, the Royal Portrait, stayed because a person chose it from twenty for looking like her.
What a credit buys, in this project's units
- Ten credits: four views of a cat from one, three of them invented.
- Thirty credits: a standard-quality mesh, 48,000 triangles, from one image. Fine at court distance.
- Sixty credits: a detailed mesh from one image or four views, up to two million triangles. Needs packing before it is usable.
- Zero credits: every re-run of the pack script, the fit code, and the look. Those are the expensive part, measured in hours rather than credits, and they are the part that decides whether the result is her.
If you are costing your own
Budget the credits for at least three attempts per subject, because the first photograph is rarely the one that works and a regeneration is a new mesh, not a retry. Budget a person's afternoon for the fit code the first time and an hour per model after. Budget for one repair per model that no script can do. And decide before you start what the acceptance test is; here it was a single question, "is it Helen?", and a person asked it of every file.
The work those hours went into is on the shippable-mesh page; the pictures that were paid for in design time rather than credits are on the site-imagery page; and how the other models on this build earn their keep is on the AI page.