Best image-to-3D tools compared, October 2026

You can now turn one picture into a textured 3D model in under a minute. The paid cloud tools all shipped new versions in the last two months, and two strong free models can run on your own PC if you have a big enough graphics card. The catch is in the details: how clean the mesh is, whether you can sell what you make, and what the "free" tier really allows. Everything below was checked on official pages on October 18, 2026. We have not run our own side-by-side test.

At a glance

	Meshy 7.1	Tripo P2.0	Hyper3D Rodin Gen-2.5	TRELLIS.2 (free)	Hunyuan3D-2.1 (free)
Made by	Meshy	Tripo (VAST)	Deemos (Hyper3D)	Microsoft	Tencent
Runs	Cloud	Cloud	Cloud	Your PC	Your PC
Latest release	Sept 10, 2026	Sept 21, 2026	May 19, 2026	Repo created Nov 2025, last push July 10, 2026 (GitHub)	Repo created June 2025 (GitHub)
Free tier	100 credits a month; outputs CC BY 4.0. Meshy 7.1 downloads need a paid plan	200 credits a month (about 13 models); public, non-commercial	Generate and preview free; pay $1.50 per credit to keep a result	Free, MIT	Free, Tencent community licence (see below)
Entry paid plan	Pro $20 a month, 1,000 credits ("up to 100 assets")	Pro $20 a month billed annually ($240/yr), 3,000 credits ("≈200 models")	Creator $30 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly ($288), "about 60 models"	n/a	n/a
Topology	Triangle mesh; up to 80M raw triangles in Ultra 4K before simplification	Native quads (500–25,000 faces) or triangles (500–50,000)	Smart Low-Poly on Creator; High-Poly Quads on Business	Triangle mesh, "arbitrary topology"	Triangle mesh
Textures	PBR	Up to 4K (free) / 8K (Max)	HD texture, baked normals	PBR (base color, roughness, metallic, opacity)	PBR
Exports	FBX, OBJ, USDZ, GLB, STL, BLEND	GLB native; converts to GLTF, FBX, USDZ, OBJ, STL, 3MF (API docs); DCC bridge for Blender, Unity, Unreal, Godot and more	API: GLB (default), USDZ, FBX, OBJ, STL (Gen-2.5 API docs); web app list not verified as of Oct 18, 2026	GLB	GLB, OBJ, PLY, STL (official Gradio app)
Hardware	Browser	Browser	Browser	NVIDIA GPU, 24 GB VRAM minimum	10 GB shape only; 29 GB shape + texture

Price per model

Vendors price in credits, so "per model" depends on settings and retries. These are the vendors' own estimates divided out, not our measurements.

Meshy. Pro is $20 for 1,000 monthly credits, which Meshy says covers "up to 100 assets" (pricing): about $0.20 per asset at best. Pro includes 4 free retries per task. New users get 50% off the first month.
Tripo. Pro is $20 a month billed annually for 3,000 credits, "≈ 200 Models ($0.16 Per Model)" by Tripo's own figure; Max is $90 a month annually for 25,000 credits, "$0.09 Per Model" (pricing). P2.0 Mesh Edit costs 50 credits per edit after Pro's 3 free edits per model (P2.0 post).
Hyper3D Rodin. On the free plan you only pay for results you keep, at $1.50 per credit (pricing). The Gen-2.5 API page lists 0.5 credits for a base generation, plus 0.5 for the Extreme-High tier and 2.0 for extreme-high textures. The Creator plan is $30 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly ($288), with an "estimated output" of "about 60 models" (pricing, read from the page's full HTML on October 18). That works out to roughly $0.50 per model. Larger Creator tiers run to $240 a month, and Business starts at $120 a month for "about 416 models".
TRELLIS.2 and Hunyuan3D-2.1. No per-model fee. You pay for the hardware and electricity, or for a cloud GPU.

An independent tracker, Top 3D AI, lists its own measured "cost per good-quality generation": about $0.53 for Meshy 7.1 and $0.29 for Rodin Gen 2.5 (October season). It does not list Tripo P2.0; its Tripo entry is v3.1 at about $0.30.

Quality: topology, textures, rigging

What vendors claim.

Meshy 7.1 is about surface detail. Its Ultra 4K mode builds geometry on a 4096³ grid, with raw meshes of up to 80 million triangles. Meshy's own "Detail Richness" benchmark ranks 7.1 first against Tripo 3.1, Hunyuan3D 3.1, Rodin 2.5 and Hi3D 3.0 (Meshy blog). That benchmark was designed and run by Meshy. Paid plans include "Unlimited Animation with 600+ motions" (pricing).
Tripo P2.0 is about clean, game-ready meshes. It makes native quad topology, splits body, clothing and accessories into separate parts, generates up to four polycount variants at once, and lets you regenerate one region with Mesh Edit (Tripo blog). Free users get two P2.0 generations; after that it needs a subscription. Tripo's API offers auto-rigging and retargeting; an October changelog entry added Rigging v3.0 for humanoids, with skeleton presets for Unity, Unreal and VRM (Tripo changelog). Note that Tripo's docs say OBJ, STL and 3MF exports don't support rigged models, and GLTF and STL store quads as triangles (conversion docs).
Rodin Gen-2.5 offers Smart Low-Poly and baked normals on Creator, and High-Poly Quads on Business (pricing).
TRELLIS.2 is a 4-billion-parameter model that outputs a PBR-textured GLB. Microsoft's README says alpha is kept in the texture but not switched on by default (repo).
Hunyuan3D-2.1 was the first Hunyuan release with full weights, training code and a PBR texture model (repo). Tencent's newer Hunyuan3D 3.1 is hosted only, with no open weights.

Independent comparisons (human votes). These rankings come from public voting sites, not from us. Each runs its own test images and settings, so they disagree.

Who ran it	Method	How the tools in this piece placed
benchmark.ai image-to-3D leaderboard (updated Oct 6, 2026)	52,667 pairwise matches, 263,258 votes, Bradley–Terry/Elo	Hi3D v3.0 #1, Meshy 7.1 #2, Tripo H3.1 #4, Hunyuan3D 3.1 Pro #5, TRELLIS.2 #7, Rodin Gen-2.5 High #8, Hunyuan3D-2.1 #11. Tripo P2.0 not listed
Top 3D AI leaderboard (October season, read Oct 18 evening; live and changes)	User votes, monthly Elo reset	Tripo v3.1 #1, Hi3D v3.0 #2, Meshy 7 #3, Rodin Gen 2.5 #4, Meshy 7.1 #5, Hunyuan 3D v3.1 #8
Taxon3D image→3D board	1,692 human votes, ranks grouped by confidence interval	Meshy 6 rank 1; TRELLIS 2 tied at rank 1; Hunyuan3D v3 and Rodin/Hyper3D rank 2. Older Meshy version

None of these boards scores topology for rigging, which is what Tripo P2.0 targets. On that, we only have reports.

What builders report on X (individual experiences, not tests):

"I've been playing a lot with Trellis 2 on my local with ComfyUI, but the results have really bad topology 🥲 … the best usable 3D model in my opinion is Tripo P2.0." — @octa2424, Sep 28
"TRELLIS.2 delivers a strong textured base … Topology cleanup, LODs, collision, and engine integration still need work before it is truly game [ready]." — @AiwithYasir, Oct 16
One-shot test of the same image: "#1 is Tripo, #2 is Meshy, #3 is TRELLIS.2 … Tripo is incredibly close to the source image." — @j_____________n, Oct 1
TRELLIS.2 went viral again Oct 12–13 (@Mnilax).

Licences and commercial use

Tool	Free-tier outputs	Paid outputs
Meshy	CC BY 4.0: commercial use allowed with attribution to Meshy (pricing FAQ)	You own the assets
Tripo	Public models, non-commercial use	Private models, commercial use
Hyper3D Rodin	10 private assets; "unlimited export and any use" is a paid-plan feature (pricing)	"Broader export and usage rights"; read the current terms
TRELLIS.2	MIT for model and code. But the official GLB export step (`o_voxel.postprocess.to_glb`) imports NVIDIA's nvdiffrast, whose licence says it "only may be used or intended for use non-commercially", meaning "for research or evaluation purposes only" (nvdiffrast LICENSE). The texturing pipeline also uses nvdiffrec. Whether this restricts the meshes you produce, not just the software, is a legal question we can't answer; check before commercial use	n/a
Hunyuan3D-2.1	Tencent Hunyuan 3D 2.1 Community License. It does not apply in the EU, UK or South Korea, and use of the model or its outputs outside the licensed territory is not allowed. If your products had more than 1 million monthly active users when the model was released, you must ask Tencent for a licence (LICENSE)	n/a

Hardware for the local models

TRELLIS.2: "An NVIDIA GPU with at least 24GB of memory is necessary", tested on A100 and H100 data-center cards (README). In consumer terms that means an RTX 3090, 4090 or 5090-class card. Community ComfyUI nodes and hosted versions (e.g. WaveSpeedAI, Unofficial) exist if you don't have one.
Hunyuan3D-2.1: 10 GB VRAM for shape only, 21 GB for texture, 29 GB for both. A --low_vram_mode flag exists (README).

Step-by-step install, Blender cleanup and engine import for both: our free image-to-3D pipeline guide.

What to weigh

What you're making. Rigged characters and game props reward clean quads and part separation (Tripo P2.0's focus). Close-up hero pieces and prints reward raw geometric detail (Meshy 7.1's focus). Expect cleanup either way.
Whether you can sell the result. Meshy's free outputs are CC BY with credit; Tripo's free outputs are non-commercial; TRELLIS.2 is MIT, but its stock export pipeline depends on NVIDIA's research-only nvdiffrast; Hunyuan3D-2.1 is off-limits in the EU, UK and South Korea.
Cost model. Subscriptions with credits (Meshy, Tripo), pay only for results you keep (Rodin free), or free software plus a 24 GB-class GPU (TRELLIS.2, Hunyuan3D-2.1).
Independent rankings disagree. Three public voting boards put different tools on top, and none scores rig-readiness. Try your own reference image on each free tier.
Version churn. Every tool here changed in the last few months. Re-check before you commit a pipeline.