Luce introduces 3D asset generation with PBR materials and relighting from a single image

Researchers published a paper on arXiv, Luce: Relightable Gaussians for 3D Asset Generation, presenting a method for generating 3D models from a single image with support for physically correct rendering. The model uses a voxelized multimodal Gaussian cloud where individual primitives handle geometry, albedo, metalness-roughness, and normals. The authors did not release the code.

What it means

Luce directly competes with the image-to-3d tools in our reference, but with an emphasis on PBR materials and relighting. Let's compare it with what already exists. Hunyuan3D 2.1 from Tencent claims generation of "production-ready PBR material," meaning the PBR approach is already present. However, the fact sheet does not specify whether the model supports relighting as a separate operation or whether PBR serves only for high-quality textures on export. TRELLIS from Microsoft and OpenLRM from 3DTopia do not mention PBR materials in their fact sheets at all. TRELLIS exports a textured mesh to glb, OpenLRM to obj, but there is no mention of splitting into albedo, metalness, and normals in the descriptions. Luce claims a 28% FID improvement and a CLIP metric of 0.8519 versus 0.8299 for the best baseline method, but without open source code and model weights, these results cannot be verified or compared with existing tools in practice. The developer does not specify VRAM requirements, export formats, or licenses. For now, Luce remains a research work without public code, so its practical value for reference users is limited. If the code becomes available, a comparison with Hunyuan3D 2.1 on PBR material quality will be the first test.