WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale (tencent-hunyuan.github.io)
229 points by EwanG 13 hours ago
avaer 12 hours ago
In case it's not obvious, this isn't a model, this is python scripts that call out to models (code not available).
It's mostly "did you know you can attach an LLM to a PCG system?", but there is one idea here you don't see much of: an image model performs the composition (which image models are really good at), and then you extract the objects into 3d via things like SAM3D before placing them in the world, which is pretty interesting.
The rest is standard stuff you'll find in your favorite PCG system/game engine. Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5 (which this project predates).
torginus 3 hours ago
LLMs are a PCG system. This is one of my pet peeves, I've been working on a procedural generation constraint system for quite a while (way before LLMs) as a hobby, that came with a domain specific language, where you could specify constraints.
Things like the red key must be reachable before the red door, and there should be no path that bypasses the red door, etc. written as a set of constraints.
I was working on is because I realized, constraints tend to be similar in nature (graph cut, minimum/maximum shortest path etc.) algorithmically, but its usually quite hard to control designer intent.
The reason I shelved the project, was I asked an LLM a couple years ago, to generate a dungeon room graph, following a similar set of constraints, but stated in plain English, and it did a perfect job.
Which brings me to my final point. LLMs are amazing and flexible constraint solvers, and are woefully underutilized in scenarios like this.
Marazan 2 hours ago
The trouble is the LLMs non-determinism and the "You're absolutely right, I placed the red key behind the red door rather than in front of it. This was load bearing for the whole dungeon and I blew it" moments.
With a hand authored constraint system if the red key is in the wrong place you have a bug in the constraint system that can be deterministically fixed, with a LLM you have to roll the dice on prompting again and go through expensive verification.
bondeau 2 hours ago
pinkmoonx 11 hours ago
That’s exactly how I’ve used tools like Tripo and Meshy.
Use any image generation tool (or any image) and have a multimodal LLM like Gemini extract individual parts of the image “isolate with a transparent background” - then you can use those images for image-to-3d in those tools.
Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
But yeah - it’s there.
avaer 11 hours ago
> Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.
I've found it's actually best to do maximal quality generation and decimate/meshopt to desired budget.
If you're raycasting against your raw art you're doing it wrong anyway, none of the big players do this precisely for the reason you mentioned. And beyond physics meshes, if you're doing anything where performance is a problem you probably want multiple LODs so you have to do this work anyway.
These days you can just ask your agent to build you a LOD pipeline and forget about it rather than sacrificing the art; Claude knows Blender.
pinkmoonx 11 hours ago
pinkmoonx 11 hours ago
Side tangent: Smart Poly is often a paid feature, but you used to be able to steal it for free. Because in order to preview it, you download the GLB in the Network tab.
Some 3D AI providers still leak like that, but Meshy came up with their own binary format that splits the stream up into separate files that are assembled with a response it only gets if you have Premium.
Thought it was cool technology - and wonder if browser games in general are doing stuff like that to protect 3D assets from being easily ripped from the Network tab.
doctoboggan 9 hours ago
> Still, think most people don't realize how good LLMs are at 3D these days, especially Fable 5
Can you explain more? Can I use Fable 5 to generate a 3d model from a couple of photographs?
cautiouscat 12 hours ago
It looks impressive. However open worlds are at their best with hand placed details and environmental storytelling. Look at Skyrim/Cyberpunk vs. Starfield where most of the world is proc gen’d.
I get that you run this, and then edit it. But the generated villages just aren’t interesting in my opinion. It’s probably great for tencent’s market where you’re mass producing gacha style games, but I don’t think worlds made in this fashion will scratch the open world itch like the best open world games out there.
avaer 12 hours ago
You know what's also good at storytelling? AI. Or else we wouldn't have writing awards being revoked when it comes out it was written by AI.
I wouldn't say we don't need artists or writers, but I think most people will be surprised how quickly fully AI driven pipelines will advance here.
binary0010 12 hours ago
I'd actually be curious to read an award winning ai book, all the ai books/interactive story generators I've tried have been... Ok at best... Do you know what novels have been written by ai and award winning?
avaer 11 hours ago
mawadev 5 hours ago
This is a great use of our global water supply
altmanaltman 8 hours ago
Its a bit like saying AI is good at math when its being used by Terrance Tao. Like okay if its so good at storytelling, use it to generate a good one and share it under this comment for feedback and we can check out how good and original it is.
Forgeties79 10 hours ago
> You know what's also good at storytelling? AI
Writing a coherent story =/= good at storytelling
dd8601fn 6 hours ago
cautiouscat 11 hours ago
What award/book was this?
FeteCommuniste 11 hours ago
saidnooneever 4 hours ago
you can do both, generate a huge world and orovide aritsts with aithoring and collaboration tools to dress it. to prevent starfieldlike stuff -__-
dyauspitr 9 hours ago
Yeah, all that hand place details and humans do it better crap only last for like three months based on the recent past.
ablation an hour ago
Again, that Claude web design aesthetic is just seemingly everywhere right now. It takes me out of what I'm reading as soon as you see the tells.
cobertos 11 hours ago
In both the Autumn and Winter examples in the hero images, the algo seemed to have placed buildings on the water in the foreground
In the summer example in the hero images, the building placement + small pockets of water on the left looks odd and low attention to detail. A similar poor quality result as if an uncaring human used a scatter brush...
Curious if the examples are cherry-picked and by how much, or if this is one-shoted
dozerly 11 hours ago
I am sure they are cherry picked. No one would spend time trying to publish results like this without picking the best results they possibly could to showcase.
andai 11 hours ago
In this competitive world, you need to integrate the cold plunge deeply with your lifestyle to stay ahead.
2001zhaozhao 11 hours ago
This kind of content generation can be quite cool to enable new game ideas for indie developers that were only possible with AAA before. But it also makes it hard to gauge the amount of human work that went into the game. When you see an elegantly designed building, environment or easter egg in the game, was that really made by a human (or even prompted by a human), or did the AI generate it autonomously as part of a much larger generation step?
smlacy 11 hours ago
> When you see an elegantly designed building ...was that really made by a human or did the AI generate it as part of a much larger generation step?
Does it matter? Why?
matsemann 2 hours ago
There are millions of games. When choosing which one to play, you've normally chosen one that looks polished over one that does not, because of what it signals. Now that signal is gone, can't easily discern what's a sloppy crappy game vs one that's actually fun to play.
2001zhaozhao 7 hours ago
To me what matters is being able to verify human authorship at a glance. It used to be that when you saw a work of visual art you were automatically 100% sure that someone had to have spent a great deal of effort producing that, but image models took it away. This is the same situation but with game environments.
Jtarii 2 hours ago
Because people don't want to be tricked by AI slop.
Forgeties79 10 hours ago
A good painting is never “just a good painting.” The context, the artist, etc. are part of the art. To remove that is to make it no longer art because it’s no longer an actual expression of anything personal. Pretty words with no intent behind them don’t mean anything.
Plenty of Holiday Inn’s have lovely painted landscapes on the walls. People aren’t paying for them to be in their homes.
mparramon 8 hours ago
BizarroLand 11 hours ago
Some people still care about it, or want a possibly shared experience over one that can only be experienced once by one person
gosolozero 12 hours ago
Interesting prompt to world pipeline. I wonder if there can be more style applied than just the "MMO cartoony" style? Like medieval Witcher or realistic Cyberpunk buildings?
avaer 12 hours ago
I'm sure the answer is yes, even now there are pretty good model generators out there that can do realistic models. Experimental things like this just tend to go with cartoony styles since mistakes and lower quality (read: faster generation) can be chalked up to "lol", whereas realistic styles tend not to be forgiving with art mismatches and shading mistakes.
In modern polished games, the art team spends a lot of time tweaking things to make sure it looks great and coherent. Most people are not willing to have their agent run for a month to do this work. I don't know if it's been tried yet but I would be really interested to see the result.
pinkmoonx 11 hours ago
Yeah any game ready asset has to be low poly. Even if it has 4k textures the polygon (vertex) count must be low to do anything meaningful (raycast, load many models).
Usually a combination of distance and frustum culling (breaking the model down into several that only load when you need to see it) with 4k or 8k textures can make a low poly game ready asset look very high quality
thymine_dimer 8 hours ago
The water levels don't change seasonally..So I'm guessing it's a very high rainfall area? In which case erosion and nutrient leaching are bound to be issues for the agentic farmers. I wonder if they've thought to build soil with perennial ground cover species..
But as I say this, I realise the tree species seem to change very dynamically from season to season. So I'll have to assume either the temporal rate of change is actually a lot slower than one would expect in a model like this (allowing large tree species to regenerate annually), or there are new coniferous flowering tree varieties in this universe.
deepmem 3 hours ago
Looking forward to hearing more updates from tencent 3D models. :)
andreypk 4 hours ago
impressive, but as I understand the worlds were pre generated an there no way to reproduce it on my setup?
EagnaIonat 5 hours ago
It looks cool. Shame the source isn't available.
But Claude can do this with little prompting.
[edit] Not sure why the downvote, but Claude Design can do this, its just a matter of knowing the exact prompt.
This was created with just the prompt on from their front page and nothing else.
That's literally a cut+paste. If I had spent time on it, you can get it close to what's shown.
Claude also created that as a Blender file with assets for each of the generated items.
Reubend 12 hours ago
The assets look good, but for some reason the terrain looks too cartoonish to me.
m00dy 10 hours ago
Unfortunately, code is not available.
ElCapitanMarkla 12 hours ago
This looks so cool. Nice work :D
awinter-py 5 hours ago
is this dwarf fortress
sergiotapia 8 hours ago
I kind of feel like this is how Crimson Desert was made.
It's enormous, but utterly devoid of any soul. Like eating a $3000 subway sandwich.
ex-aws-dude 11 hours ago
I hate to be an HN bikeshedder but why is everything "Claw" recently?
bonoboTP 10 hours ago
Because it's a buzzword. It causes buzz. Putting it together with "world" makes it buzz even more because people want to talk about world models all the time (it doesn't matter what the actual input and output is, just that it's a world model, not some meagerly language model, it models all the world, much better than modeling just boring old language), as well as about claws. So that's why.
consumer451 10 hours ago
Branding is amazing. In this case with a normal word, it's a sort of network effect?
Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, just spoke at YC Startup School. The entire thing is worth a view.
> There are 33,000 "claw" named repositories.
ex-aws-dude 10 hours ago
What does it mean in general for something to be a “claw”?
virgildotcodes 3 hours ago
benatkin 10 hours ago
Cordiali 10 hours ago
It's just the natural evolution of AI into a crab.
atum47 12 hours ago
Looks impressive, haven't looked at the code yet, I'll at night.
tjohns 12 hours ago
There is no code. The GitHub repo is empty.
rrr_oh_man 12 hours ago
"LGTM - approve"
dyauspitr 5 hours ago
What code, isn’t this just LLM output