Co-founder at Tractive
Chris Harding
Previously CTO at Disperse, a construction startup using AI to generate 3D models of large-scale building sites. Helped scale the organisation to 200+ and raise $32m in VC funding. Former tech lead at Palantir, led their anti-human trafficking project.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
When people think about art, they typically imagine fun, creative workflows - painting, sculpting, sketching etc. But for 3D artists, the reality is that huge amounts of time are spent on tedious, repetitive tasks like retopology and UV mapping. We want to liberate artists to focus on their most creative and expressive work, by automating the time consuming tasks that get in the way. And with new AI techniques emerging, this is finally becoming possible. A lot of artists are anxious about AI - they are worried about it taking their jobs, flooding the industry with low-quality media, and obviating human creativity. But when we talk to them about our mission, they are as excited as we are.
What inspired you to start your business?
At our previous startup, we were involved in 3D scanning massive construction sites for clients in the construction industry. When we started out, we wanted to bring the same technology to gaming studios, helping them quickly build 3D worlds by feeding real-life reference photos into generative AI models. We quickly realised that artists don’t want or need more efficient ways of creating new 3D models - it’s the downstream work required to retopo, UV map, texture, rig and animate models that is by far the biggest bottleneck. At that point we quickly pivoted, and began developing the world’s first dedicated AI model for 3D retopology, in collaboration with some of the world’s leading game studios (Rocksteady, Supercell, Jagex).
