AI prompt to STL file :- An experimentation

With so many AI and LLM stuff going around, I wanted to see if I can leverage the power of AI to simplify the design of practical 3d printable items.

My question - Can we directly generate STL files from natural language prompts?

In order to find the answer, I conducted an experimentation using Claude and Python, specifically using Python's Numpy-STL library.

Step 1 -

I asked Claude to help me generate 3d models. Since Claude doesn't inherently have 3d model generation capability, I asked it to suggest alternate ways in which it could help. Claude came up with the below suggestions (rather very reluctantly I must say??)

The response gave me some starting points to research, and that's when I found out about Numpy-STL.

Step 2 -

I asked Claude to utilize the Numpy-STL library to write the code to generate a simple cube. See the results below??

So far so good. But this is not interesting??

We gotta level up!

Step 3 -

In order to increase the sophistication, I prompted Claude to generate the 3d model of a chair. I further instructed to use basic geometrical objects such as a Cuboid to construct the seat, backrest and legs of the chair.

As you can see, the result was not perfect, but quite impressive.

Still, perfect is perfect! I prompted again by including the mistakes and instructed to generate the model exactly how I want it -

I finally got the result which I imaged in my mind. All this within 2 iterations! Impressive??

Step 4 -

Time to level up a bit more :)

One of the things I've been experimenting for a while is to make a collapsible container using my 3D Printer . So I instructed Claude to do the same. The results are neat, except for incorrect tolerance and clearance values, which was due to lack of user input.

Conclusion -

I'm pretty happy with the results of my initial experimentation, although, on further exploration I found out that this method is still not capable of making complex geometrical figures. But that day is not far away, and I'm excited for a Tony Stark future where I can just convey my thought process to a Jarvis and it creates my 3d model in real time without me requiring to spend hours on Blender or CAD software like Fusion360.