# Capture vs. Generate

**Track:** 3D — beginner → intermediate — Generative AI 3D — proposed
**Framework / surface:** ij8 Studio (concept)
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** From Flat Art to 3D

**In one line:** Photogrammetry, NeRF and Gaussian splatting vs generative mesh.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Two philosophies meet here. Capture reconstructs a thing that exists: photogrammetry triangulates geometry from overlapping photographs (structure-from-motion, as in COLMAP); NeRF (Mildenhall et al., 2020) learns a scene as a continuous radiance field queried per ray; 3D Gaussian Splatting (Kerbl et al., 2023) renders millions of fuzzy ellipsoids for real-time, photoreal novel views. Generation, by contrast, invents — synthesizing a plausible object from a single image and a learned prior, imagining the unseen sides. Capture when the subject is real, present, and fidelity matters: a heritage artifact, a scanned actor. Generate when the subject is imagined, unavailable, or need only be convincing rather than measured.