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Comment by data-ottawa

16 hours ago

It’s amazing this runs perfectly smooth on my iPhone 12 mini

That is indeed a very cool scene being about to wander around and still have decent resolution

Ah the timeless joy of falling through the floor geometry.

Seriously though - it's breathtaking.

The first guy who figures out the bridge between splats and dynamism - animation, editing, responsiveness - is going to be one of the immortals of 3d design.

  • There are many ways to represent 3D data, but animations really only work properly with polygon meshes (e.g. triangle surface meshes or volumetric tetrahedral meshes).

    • But the mesh is itself an abstraction, you just need to build that bridge.

      We've been leaning away from pure polygons for decades, anyway. Vertex skinning, SDFs, volumetrics, simulation, and a lot more.

      The meshes in a From Software game are for exmple hilariously simple, most of the animation is force simulation to make the famous "frizzles" that they like.

      2 replies →

    • I don’t know. Maybe today, but tomorrow?

      If you can sample points inside a volume, in theory you could do that with splat geometry. If someone figures out a way to pass in animation time to a sampler, sample along geometry/wireframe or something else, and keep it from overly twinkling it might change everything.

      I’m hand waving all the complexity into “if done one figures out”, of course.

      I just don’t see why this method can’t evolve in the way diffusion models have evolved (knowing very little of the geberative mechanics of splats).

      2 replies →

    • It’s easy but a bit data intensive. Take two 3D splat images at different times, optimize them, then interpolate from the first to the second. Repeat at intervals. Now you have a video. A full moving subject is about 500Mbps, although it depends a lot on the quality of the source images that you make the 3D splats from and how detailed the output image is. Search for “4D gaussian splats” to find references.

      2 replies →

    • You pretty much just need a representation that can be constructed reasonably and interpolated.