Pixal3D image to 3D

About

Pixal3D turns a single picture into a real 3D model. Give it one image and it returns a textured GLB — the binary glTF format that Unity, Unreal, Blender, three.js and every mainstream AR and VR viewer open natively — so what comes back is an asset you can drop into a scene, not another picture of an object.

The mesh arrives at roughly 695,000 triangles carrying a full PBR material set baked from the high-poly reconstruction: base colour, metallic-roughness, normal and ambient occlusion, at 4K, 2K and 1K respectively. That is enough surface information to light the object properly in an engine instead of leaning on the shading that happened to be in the source photo.

It is built on TRELLIS.2 and it always needs a starting image — there is no text-to-3D path here. There is also no prompt: BiRefNet isolates the subject automatically, so a clean photo of one object is the entire request. If the frame is busy and you need one particular thing out of it, cut that object out with SAM 3 first and hand Pixal3D the result.

Four options can only reduce the work: texture size, mesh target faces, normal-map size and ambient-occlusion size. Each already ships at its maximum, so lowering one costs less to produce and can never cost more. Mesh target faces is the one most worth setting — 695K triangles is far heavier than a real-time engine wants, and asking for a fraction of that gives you a more useful asset from the same reconstruction.

Shape resolution is the one option that moves the price, and it is the one that can move it upwards. A reconstruction runs at 1024 unless you ask otherwise, which costs $0.30; raising it to 1536 buys a finer shape latent for $0.42. In one measured run on an RTX 5090 a 1536 reconstruction took about 122 seconds — a single run rather than a benchmark, and different hardware will behave differently.

Run it from the Sogni app by opening an image and choosing Make a 3D model, or call it by model id from the JavaScript or Python SDK. The reconstruction happens on the Sogni Supernet, a decentralized network of creator GPUs, so you never install a 3D pipeline or rent a 30GB card to try it.

Prompting tips

Pixal3D takes no prompt at all, and it rebuilds what it can actually see — so every bit of the quality comes out of the source image:

• One object, fully visible — Frame a single subject with none of it cropped away. Geometry that never appears in the picture has to be invented, and invented geometry is where reconstructions go soft.
• Sharp beats big — A crisp, in-focus photo reconstructs better than a large blurry one. Motion blur and heavy compression artefacts both end up in the mesh.
• Avoid heavy occlusion — Hands, foliage and props in front of the subject become part of the silhouette. Shoot or pick a frame where nothing overlaps the object.
• Even, diffuse light — Baked-in highlights and hard shadows are baked into the base-colour map too. Flat, even lighting gives you a texture you can relight in an engine.
• Busy frame? Cut it out first — BiRefNet keeps whatever it decides is the foreground, which is the wrong call when several things are in front. Select the object with SAM 3, cut it out on transparency, and reconstruct that instead.
• Ask for fewer triangles — Set meshTargetFaces to whatever your engine actually wants. The 700,000-face default costs the same as 60,000, but 60,000 is the one you can ship.

The five options

Four of these already ship at their maximum, so each one can only ask for less work than you are already paying for. shapeResolution is the exception: its default sits at the floor, and raising it is the only thing on this page that costs more.

Pricing

Use pay-as-you-go Spark packs for each model (1 Spark = $0.005), or choose a flat-rate Sogni plan for credit-free fair-use generation in the app.

Shape resolution is the only option that changes what a reconstruction costs. A request is billed at the cheapest priced point that covers the resolution it will actually run at, so 1024 pays the 1024 rate and anything from 1025 to 1536 pays the 1536 rate.

1 Spark = $0.005. Pay as you go with Spark packs, or generate under fair use on a flat monthly Sogni plan.

API

One Sogni API key reaches every model on the Supernet — call Pixal3D with the exact model id.

import { readFileSync } from 'node:fs';
import { SogniClient } from '@sogni-ai/sogni-client';

const client = await SogniClient.createInstance({
  appId: crypto.randomUUID(),
  apiKey: process.env.SOGNI_API_KEY,
  network: 'fast',
});

const project = await client.projects.create({
  type: 'image',
  modelId: 'pixal3d_int8_i23d',
  positivePrompt: '',
  numberOfMedia: 1,
  startingImage: readFileSync('teapot.jpg'),
  // Reduce-only: this default is already the maximum, so it costs no more.
  meshTargetFaces: 60000,
});

const [url] = await project.waitForCompletion();
console.log(url); // textured .glb — download within 24h

import asyncio, os
from sogni_client import SogniClient

async def main():
    async with await SogniClient.create(
        api_key=os.environ["SOGNI_API_KEY"],
        app_id="pixal3d-example",
    ) as sogni:
        project = await sogni.projects.create(
            type="image",
            model_id="pixal3d_int8_i23d",
            positive_prompt="",
            number_of_media=1,
            starting_image="teapot.jpg",
            # Reduce-only: this default is already the maximum.
            mesh_target_faces=60000,
        )
        for url in await project.wait_for_completion():
            print(url)  # textured .glb

asyncio.run(main())

Call pixal3d_int8_i23d with a source image and no prompt. Image-to-3D is not a Creative Agent tool, so there is no REST workflow alias — use the JavaScript or Python SDK. Full reference at docs.sogni.ai.