GAUSSIAN SPLATTING TECH
"Expanding our horizons into the world of radiance fields has opened up exciting new opportunities for collaboration with other companies,” she continues. “On our journey into Gaussian splats, we’ve been working closely with Prism AI director Neirin Jones, seeing very positive results – including playing with how to capture light and movement in 3D space.” Photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting have crossover, to an extent, as Dewar explains. “Splat creation involves taking high-resolution photographs from carefully selected angles, in order to completely cover the subject.” But turning that image data into the viewable result can be hard work for the hardware. “The processing requirements vary a lot between subjects. The datasets are similar in size to a 3D scan, so the storage requirements don’t change too much, but the processing is a lot more resource-intensive than with 3D scans.” Ensuring an adequate supply of people to do that work – as and when the technique hits the mainstream – falls to the education system. Cristen Caine is R&D producer at the NFTS, a role that brings him into contact with a range of new ideas. “I’ve spent most of my career in the TV industry, but joined the NFTS early last year. The innovation, or R&D, department looks at new technologies; what our students will need to know to build a career that fulfils their ambitions.” Gaussian splatting, Caine says, remains a nascent technique, but one those students are likely to encounter. “It’s an emergent 3D capture technology – similar to photogrammetry – although instead of capturing meshes, it captures points of light in space; where they are and their dimensions. Within that you can measure colour and scale. Photogrammetry can’t really capture glass windows; an example we used at the school was to capture the pod from Aliens . Splatting understands it perfectly.” While the overall photographic processes have much in common, splatting can make capturing such a scene less complicated. “We’ve found that you don’t need to capture as many images as you do for photogrammetry,” Caine suggests, “and you don’t need to be as careful about where the edges of those images are, which makes it faster to capture. With a small object, we
That’s where I got hooked on LiDAR and photoscanning. I met the Clear Angle team on Bloodshot , where they were doing LiDAR scanning.” Dewar is keen to emphasise that Gaussian splatting is “completely different from polygon-based rendering; like a very sophisticated point cloud, but instead of just dots, you have these tiny, soft-edged ellipsoids that blend together to form a photorealistic 3D volume.” Even so, she continues, the technique is “not a direct replacement for traditional 3D modelling methods like mesh and UV map creation. There is research going on to bridge that gap, but think of Gaussian splatting as a way to splat a scene into a viewable, interactive format, rather than a starting point for traditional 3D assets.”
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