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.
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.
The Dreams game engine (only for PS4) does this and is able to achieve scenes that no other game engine can. Here's a technical talk about how they did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.
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:
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.
Fable 5.2 is really good at using Blender from my testing. That being said, even smaller models are good enough for junior level work, it just depends on what deliverable or metric you are looking at. Most agentic LLMs can now do low poly assets for example.
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.
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.
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/
The Dreams game engine (only for PS4) does this and is able to achieve scenes that no other game engine can. Here's a technical talk about how they did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.
Pretty sure they use SDFs, not triangle or gaussian splatting
They've made a follow up to that called MeshSplatting. https://meshsplatting.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
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
Wow, that video made me instantly nauseous.
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.
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?
Fable 5.2 is really good at using Blender from my testing. That being said, even smaller models are good enough for junior level work, it just depends on what deliverable or metric you are looking at. Most agentic LLMs can now do low poly assets for example.
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.