Direct2.5: Diverse Text-to-3D Generation via Multi-view 2.5D Diffusion
Authors: Yuanxun Lu, Jingyang Zhang, Shiwei Li, Tian Fang, David McKinnon, Yanghai Tsin, Long Quan, Xun Cao, Yao Yao

Recent advances in generative AI have unveiled significant potential for the creation of 3D content. However current methods either apply a pre-trained 2D diffusion model with the time-consuming score distillation sampling (SDS) or a direct 3D diffusion model trained on limited 3D data losing generation diversity. In this work we approach the problem by employing a multi-view 2.5D diffusion fine-tuned from a pre-trained 2D diffusion model. The multi-view 2.5D diffusion directly models the structural distribution of 3D data while still maintaining the strong generalization ability of the original 2D diffusion model filling the gap between 2D diffusion-based and direct 3D diffusion-based methods for 3D content generation. During inference multi-view normal maps are generated using the 2.5D diffusion and a novel differentiable rasterization scheme is introduced to fuse the almost consistent multi-view normal maps into a consistent 3D model. We further design a normal-conditioned multi-view image generation module for fast appearance generation given the 3D geometry. Our method is a one-pass diffusion process and does not require any SDS optimization as post-processing. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our direct 2.5D generation with the specially-designed fusion scheme can achieve diverse mode-seeking-free and high-fidelity 3D content generation in only 10 seconds.