I needed a rough 3D prop for a game prototype, one photo of a wooden crate, turned into something I could drop into an engine that same afternoon. Sounds like exactly the thing AI 3D generation should be good at in 2026. In practice I burned an evening on three different tools before I got anything usable.
The first tool exported a GLB that looked fine in its own preview window and then imported into my engine with inverted normals, half the crate rendering inside-out. The second one only offered a proprietary viewer format, no OBJ or STL export at all unless I paid for a tier I didn't need for a prototype. The third gave me a real mesh but it was a single fused blob, no separation between the crate's slats and its frame, so I couldn't texture or rig anything on it.
What actually got me a usable file was Sculptly's photo-to-mesh generator, mostly because it exports what I actually needed instead of what was easiest for them to render: a real GLB, OBJ, and STL from the same generation, not a locked-in viewer format. First model is free with no account and no card, which meant I could just test the crate photo before deciding if the tool was worth using at all instead of registering first and finding out the export was broken after the fact.
The part I didn't expect to care about: it also produces a Gaussian splat as a .ply file from the same single image, something none of the other three tools even attempted. I didn't need the splat for the game prototype, but I generated one anyway out of curiosity and it held detail on the crate's wood grain that the mesh version simply couldn't represent, since a mesh has to commit to hard edges and a splat doesn't.
It's still not magic. A single photo of a crate at one angle means the generator has to guess at what the back and underside look like, and on more complex objects that guess shows. It's a starting mesh for a prototype, not a final asset for a shipped product. But for what I needed that afternoon, a mesh with correct normals, in a format my engine could actually import, was the entire ask, and it's the only one of the four tools that cleared that bar on the first try.
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