Comment by ricardobeat
1 day ago
The color is view-dependent, which also means the lighting is baked in and results in them not being usable directly for 3D animation/environments (though I’m sure there must be research happening on dynamic lighting).
Sometimes it will “go wrong”, you can see in some of the fly models that if you get too close, body parts start looking a bit transparent as some of the specular highlights are actually splats on the back of an internal surface. This is very evident with mirrors - they are just an inverted projection which you can walk right into.
Feels like there must be some way to use "variability of colour by viewing angle" for tiny clusters of volumes in the object as a way to generate material settings when converting the Gaussian splat model to a traditional 3D model.
E.g. if you have a cluster of tiny adjacent volumes that have high variability based on viewing angle, but the difference between each of those volumes is small, handle it as a smooth, reflective surface, like chrome.
You can’t easily convert a gaussian splat to a polygon based model, the representation through blurry splats is the breakthrough.