Comment by markisus
1 day ago
Yes, the normal case uses 2D input, but it can take hours to create the scene. Using the depth channel allows me to create the scene in 33 milliseconds, from scratch, every frame. You could conceptualize this as a compromise between raw pointcloud rendering and fully precomputed Gaussian splat rendering. With pointclouds, you have a lot visual artifacts due to sparsity (low texture information, seeing "through" objects"). With Gaussian splatting, you can transfer a lot more of the 2D texture information into 3D space and render occlusion and view-dependent effects better.
How do the view-dependent effects get "discovered" from only a single source camera angle?
Actually there are multiple source cameras. The neural net learns to interpolate the source camera colors based on where the virtual camera is. Under the hood it's hard to say exactly what's going on in the mind of the neural net, but I think it's something like "If I'm closer to camera A, take most of the color from camera A."
Gaussian splatting does not use neural nets. It runs an optimizer on the Gaussian splattering parameters. I think in your comment you are talking about Neural Radiance Fields (Nerfs).
So we’re not sure how it works exactly ?
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