Blender 5.3 released with Gaussian Splat support

Every time I hear about Gaussian splatting, I think about triangle splatting[0] - GPUs were built to render triangles, so I wonder what games would be like if we supported generating and rendering them as much as we do Gaussian splats.

[0] https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

Bundle support in geometry nodes is huge for complex pipelines and workflows, particularly when combined with lists and closures. I have been running on the alpha builds to get access to them in my workflows.

It took me a while to properly understand it, but it's genuinely great. It maps so much more of what I expect from traditional coding, scripting etc into the visual paradigm and makes an awful lot easier to use.

Also, should out to databpy and nodebpy, both of which are indispensable and make using nodes and blender so much nicer:

https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/databpy https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/nodebpy

Tried the beta on my M4 a couple of weeks ago on a scene of 4M splats (exported from spirula studio, great tool) , and found that it's immediately very mature, fast, and well-integrated. I could not find anyinconstencies with the rest of the interface. Congrats to the team!

If you enjoy or get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/

They have easy subscription options, even a monthly coffee adds up! Thanks!

Interesting discussion from start of this year of one of the first popular music videos made with this technology. Some decent explanations in there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670024

Does anyone have recommendations for video / 4d splats? Are there softwares / techniques to check out? How to record, render, etc.

Thanks!

I just started work on a screencast video for this year's EmacsConf. Previously I had used ScreenFlow on macOS for this sort of thing, but having since fled macOS I was casting about for something in the Linux world to replace my workflow.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Blender has a fairly competent video editor built into it. I was also stoked to learn that Blender has a built in Python interpreter, and it was pretty easy to build a Python startup module that registers a timer callback that polls a directory looking for evidence of new OBS screen recordings, and upon finding one automatically appends it to the open project. An integration with i3 and the OBS WebSocket API made it possible to start, stop, and finalize screen recordings to ensure that all the filesystem writes were atomic.

Another Blender Python startup module was able to implement all the timeline editing commands that are hardwired into my fingers from a decade of ScreenFlow and Logic Pro use, so I was able to be reasonably productive right away. Blender 5.3 is the first version I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but color me impressed! It supports my old 5700xt GPU via Vulkan, so with a little more tweaking I was able to get hardware H264 encode/decode working too.

Pretty cool, no need for ScreenFlow!

You show something to your boss, he pats you on the shoulder and says "Perfect! Just move chairs 2 feet left and ship it". How does one do it with gaussian splats?

Apparently, while Gaussian splatting is not the core technique for all world models, it has become a dominant representation and rendering backend for spatial and reconstructive world models.

Pretty cool that Gaussian Splatting is included in Blender. It always amazes me how many (sometimes pretty hidden) features Blender provides while still being rather a lean piece of software. I believe though that Gaussian Splatting is not ideal for getting well-structured mesh data with limited vertices for typical video game usage. I'm wondering where this is going in the future.

We are converging on text specification to 3D world. Gaussian Splat technology doesn't get as much hype as it deserves. The killer app for VR headsets is still to come.

For those who use Blender for work, how far are models like Astra away from using Blender to create something good enough at a junior, senior level?

Wanted to get into GS for 2 years already, and I have no idea where to even start. It's such a fast-paced field.

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