I've wanted to have a little 3D avatar of myself on my personal website for a long time. I even went through that classic donut Blender tutorial and a pretty lengthy course in Three.js.
I ended up burning a couple of months on it before completely forgetting about it. Now, with the proliferation of generative AI tools, I thought I’d take another swing at it.
The process: Generate a rough image of yourself on Midjourney -> Use one of the Img to 3D spaces on Hugging Face.
Midjourney Process
Midjourney isn't great at replicating reference images and tweaking them, so anything remotely realistic was out of the picture. Others may have found a way to make this work, but I didn’t. Instead, I found that describing my features in the prompt worked pretty well (e.g., black curly hair, scruffy facial hair, etc.).
I browsed the Explore tab, experimenting with different tags and style reference images. I adjusted chaos, weirdness, and stylize values, running tons of iterations until I found one I liked enough to continue with.
This one came together using a "Minecraft character" tag.
First up was Hi3DGen
I had to pinch myself here—just the thought of this being possible even two years ago, when I was messing around with Three.js, would've been unthinkable. But here it is, taking maybe 30 seconds. Still, I’m lazy and want a finished product with textures, so the search continued.
Then I went for TripSG
Here's a little demo of that final model
What amazes me most about this process is the accessibility. These powerful AI tools have democratized 3D character creation - something that previously required specialized skills in modeling, texturing, and rigging. Now anyone can create personalized 3D avatars in minutes rather than days.
The quality isn’t perfect yet, but it’s getting there fast.