E-commerce · 3D / AR · Case Study

From product photo to AR-ready 3D in 90 seconds with TRELLIS

A furniture retailer wanted AR room-placement for every SKU, but commissioning 3D scans was $80–200 per item. We built a TRELLIS-based image-to-3D pipeline that generates AR-grade GLB meshes from a single product photo in 90 seconds.

90 sec
from product photo → textured GLB mesh
$0.30
per asset (commissioned scans: $80–$200)
6,000
SKUs converted in the first month
+19%
conversion lift on newly AR-enabled items
Problem

What they were stuck on

The retailer's app has “place this in your room” AR - but only on the 12% of SKUs they'd paid to 3D-scan. The other 88% just showed a flat image. Conversion on AR-enabled items was 2.3× higher than non-AR, so this was a real revenue hole. Commissioning 3D scans at scale was a multi-million-dollar non-starter.

Approach

How we built it

STEP 01

Model selection

Benchmarked Microsoft TRELLIS, InstantMesh, and Wonder3D on 200 reference products spanning sofas, lamps, vases, and small accessories. TRELLIS-image-large won on mesh quality and PBR material fidelity.

STEP 02

Catalogue-aware preprocessing

Built a preprocessing step that crops, background-removes, and category-classifies the product photo - then routes to the right TRELLIS prompt and material preset based on category (matte / fabric / metal / glass).

STEP 03

Multi-view refinement

When multiple catalogue angles exist for an SKU, we condition TRELLIS on the front shot and refine the mesh against a side and rear shot. Cuts geometric error by ~40% on asymmetric items.

STEP 04

GLB export pipeline

Generated meshes auto-decimated to AR-app polycount budgets (15k tris for hero items, 6k for accessories), baked PBR materials, and stamped with SKU metadata.

STEP 05

Render farm + cache

Async job queue on a single DGX Spark - 12 GB VRAM per render - pushing GLBs into the retailer's existing CDN. Models that pass QC are cached forever. ~6k SKUs generated in the first month.

Stack

What we used

AzureMicrosoft TRELLIS image-largeCustom preprocessing classifierPBR material presetsGLB export + decimationNvidiaNvidia DGX SparkLiteLLM gateway
Outcomes

What changed

90 secfrom product photo → textured GLB mesh
$0.30per asset (commissioned scans: $80–$200)
6,000SKUs converted in the first month
+19%conversion lift on newly AR-enabled items

Every SKU now has AR. We stopped paying per-scan and the conversion lift paid for the whole project in two months.

- Head of Product, furniture retailer (name withheld)

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