GAUSSIAN SPLATTING TECH
STEADY IMPROVEMENTS One NFTS project is using Gaussian splatting to render a 3D version of a snail character in Unreal Engine (above, below left)
circle from the ground looking upward, from the middle and from a higher angle looking down. These are enough to work out where the surfaces and background are,” Caine says, but cautions that “consistent lighting is really important. Use good, clean lighting and capture all angles, and you can create really nice models in a small time frame. It’s quite GPU-heavy – programs like Postshot need to run on beefy computers.” A key factor is that shape, texture and lighting are represented in a single data set, which might raise eyebrows among people accustomed to the option to relight a mesh to suit new scenes. This, Caine says, is being worked on: “We have some colleagues at the University of Surrey doing relighting research, and also some work on compression – trying to bring file sizes down.” What differentiates all of film and TV from photography, though, is movement, and Caine accepts that this is a work in progress. “It’s a very central part of our research. Wallace, Gromit and Peppa Pig all came from NFTS alumni, and the animators are always developing new techniques.” Capturing a sequence of
scenes to represent motion presents issues: “We tried capturing frame by frame and putting those together to capture fluid motion. I don’t want to suggest we’re the leading researchers in this area, because we’re not, but we believe motion splats aren’t quite there.” Notwithstanding earlier work on what’s widely called volume rendering, the current incarnation of Gaussian splatting is new enough to be the talk of SIGGRAPH for a while. “I think the very first paper on splatting came out this month,” Caine says. “When we picked it up, it was only nine months old as a technology. As we’re testing and making short films, new papers are being released – and a plug-in was released for Adobe After Effects while we were working on it.” Dewar concurs. “New developments are emerging almost daily, particularly around optimisation and speed. We’re seeing a lot of advancements in editing splat data. Imagine being able to paint or sculpt a captured 3D scene, with the option to add or remove objects in a photorealistic way. That opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for VP and content creation.”
WE ARE SEEING a lot of advancements IN EDITING GAUSSIAN SPLAT DATA”
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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