Tripo
Image and text to 3D from VAST in Beijing. Hosted Tripo 3.0 Ultra reaches 2 million polygons, while TripoSG 1.5B, TripoSR and UniRig ship as MIT-licensed weights you can run yourself.
Overview
VAST runs two tracks at once and the difference between them is the whole story. There is the hosted product, where Tripo 3.0 landed in September 2025 with roughly twenty times the parameter count of the 2.x line and an Ultra mode that pushes two million polygons, followed by Tripo H3.1 and Smart Mesh P1.0 in March 2026. Then there is VAST-AI-Research on GitHub, which has shipped TripoSR with Stability AI, TripoSG at 1.5B, UniRig for automatic rigging and TripoSplat for image-to-Gaussian conversion. That second track is MIT. The money followed the first: nearly $200 million across Series A+ and A++ announced on 1 June 2026, led by INCE Capital, on top of an earlier round with Alibaba and Baidu Ventures, against a claimed 10 million users and 90,000 studio clients including NetEase and Sony.
The practical shape for an engineer is simple. TripoSG runs on one card with more than 8GB of VRAM, weights are on Hugging Face in safetensors, and inference is plain diffusers, so nothing about the setup is China-specific and nothing forces you onto ModelScope. The API is equally undramatic: credits at one cent, about 20 for a base generation, roughly 30 more for high-detail geometry, 7.5 for quad remeshing and 60 to 80 for a game-ready Smart Mesh pass. Official SDKs cover Python, Go, Java, Rust and JavaScript, and there are maintained ComfyUI nodes. No mainland phone number, no business licence, a foreign card works.
On mesh quality, be realistic. Smart Mesh produces quad-dominant output that a game or product-visualisation pipeline will accept, and that is a real step up from the triangle soup of 2024-era generators. It is still generated geometry. Edge loops follow the surface, not the designer's intent, holes and thin walls remain the failure cases, and there is no parametric history behind any of it. The honest use is speed to a physical prototype or a visual, with a CAD rebuild whenever a part has to be manufactured to a tolerance.
Key Features
- ✓ TripoSG image-to-3D foundation model, 1.5B parameters on a rectified flow transformer, released under MIT and running on a single GPU with more than 8GB of VRAM
- ✓ Hosted Tripo 3.0, released September 2025, at roughly twenty times the parameter scale of the 2.x line, with an Ultra mode reaching two million polygons
- ✓ Smart Mesh retopology turning dense generated geometry into quad topology, extended by Tripo H3.1 and Smart Mesh P1.0 in March 2026
- ✓ UniRig for automatic rigging and TripoSplat for converting 2D images to 3D Gaussians, both open on GitHub and updated through August 2026
- ✓ REST API at one cent per credit, with official SDKs for Python, Go, Java, Rust and JavaScript plus ComfyUI custom nodes
- ✓ Weights published on Hugging Face in safetensors, usable through plain diffusers and transformers with no China-specific tooling
Where it holds
- • The open releases are genuine MIT, not a community licence with a monthly-active-user cap or a field-of-use clause, so TripoSG and TripoSR clear a corporate legal review without an argument
- • Weights sit on Hugging Face rather than ModelScope only, and the API takes a foreign card with no mainland phone number or business licence
- • Quad retopology is part of the pipeline rather than a separate cleanup product you buy from someone else
- • The open research line is alive, not a one-off paper drop: TripoSplat was updated 13 August 2026 and StereoWorld on 22 August 2026
Where it breaks
- • The strong models are the hosted ones. TripoSG at 1.5B sits well behind Tripo 3.0 Ultra and VAST has given no indication it will open the 3.x line
- • Generated topology is quad-dominant, not CAD. There is no parametric feature tree, no B-rep and no dimensional guarantee, so it is a starting mesh for a product designer rather than a replacement for SolidWorks or CATIA
- • Free-plan outputs come with a Creative Commons licence that withholds commercial rights, which catches teams that prototype free and then ship
- • TripoSG's own repository has had no model update since the scribble variant in April 2025, so the open line moves in bursts tied to paper releases rather than continuously
My Take
Two products live inside one brand. VAST puts TripoSG's 1.5B weights and inference code out under MIT with no user cap and no field-of-use clause, then keeps the strong models hosted: Tripo 3.0 Ultra runs about twenty times the parameter scale and reaches two million polygons. Plan around that split. Use the open models as a research and pipeline base, pay the one-cent credits when you need production geometry, and rebuild in CAD the moment a tolerance appears on the drawing.
Quick Info
- Pricing:
- freemium
- Openness:
- Open weights
- Licence:
- MIT for the open releases (TripoSG, TripoSR, UniRig, TripoSplat); the hosted Tripo 3.x models are proprietary
- Starting at:
- Free tier with 300 credits a month, Professional at $15.90 a month for 3,000 credits, then Advanced and Premium tiers above that. API credits are $0.01 each: roughly 20 credits for a base generation, about 30 more for high-detail geometry, 7.5 for quad remeshing and 60 to 80 for a game-ready Smart Mesh pass. Free-tier outputs carry a Creative Commons licence without commercial rights, paid plans include commercial use. TripoSG, TripoSR, UniRig and TripoSplat weights cost nothing under MIT.
- Added:
- Aug 2026
- Updated:
- Aug 2026
Use Cases
Judge it on your own work
The notes above say where Tripo holds and where it breaks. The fastest check is your own workload.
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