Macro Splats 2025
danybittel.ch329 points by danybittel 11 hours ago
329 points by danybittel 11 hours ago
Looks amazing. Some feedback on the website - black text on a dark grey background? I had to use reader mode.
I have the opposite experience to you. This website is one of the few websites I can read clearly without any blurred edges with my glasses on.
Then you need to turn down brightness of your screen. You obviously have it set way too high.
This is objectively violating accessibility guidelines for contrast.
Yeah. Even with very low brightness it works well for me.
The best thing about reader mode is that there’s now always an escape hatch for those who it doesn’t work for.
I still don't get the point of Gaussian Splats. How are they better than triangles?
It's just a simpler primitive I assume. Blurs and colors and angles are simpler than 3D geometries, so it's probably more aligned with working/thinking with other very low-level primitives with minimal dimensions (like the math of neural networks). I dunno, I'm kinda vibing a response here -- maybe someone else can give you a more authoritative answer
That wasp is one of the single most impressive pieces of computer graphics I have ever seen, and seemingly in contradiction also a fantastic piece of macro photography. The fact it renders in real time is amazing.
There was a discussion on here the other day about the PS6, and honestly were I involved in consoles/games production anymore I'd be looking seriously about how to incorporate assets like this.
Gaussian splats don't offer the flexibility required for your typical videogame. Since it isn't true PBR its lighting is kind of hardcoded. Rigging doesn't work well with it. And editing would be very hard.
It's good for visualizing something by itself, but not for building a scene out of it.
People are working on recovering PBR properties, rigging, and editing. I think those are all solveable over time. I wouldn't start a big project with it today, but maybe in a couple years.
If you want a real cursed problem for Gaussian splats though: global illumination. People have decomposed splat models into separate global and PBR colors, but I have no clue how you'd figure out where that global illumination came from, let alone recompute it for a new lighting situation.
Yeah no animation is a pretty big blocker. The tech can handle video clips tho.
I wonder if it's possible to do some kind of blendshape style animation, where you blend between multiple recorded poses.
It would next extension and extra parameters, but plenty of AAA assets have had their shaders produced by cameras with fancy lighting rigs for many years.
It’d be amazing to see a collab with the Exquisite Creatures Revealed artist. He preserves all kinds of insects and presents them in a way that highlights the color and iridescent effects nature offers. I was so blown away by the exhibit I went back. Artist: https://christophermarley.com/
This looks amazing, and never thought to combine macro photography and Gaussian splatting.
I'd also like to show my gratitude for you releasing this as a free culture file! (CC BY)
Very cool, unfortunately I find the 3D completely unusable on mobile. The moment I touch it in orbit mode it locks to a southern pole view and whips about like crazy however I try rotate it.
Hello, playcanvas developer here. May I ask what phone/device you're on? Might be a bug. (No pun intended).
No issues here on iPhone 12 running iOS 18.6.2 and Firefox 143.2 (62218)
The orbiting sensitivity is a bit high when zoomed in a lot, which can lead to the model spinning out of control, as the other user mentioned.
Still manageable though, just very sensitive.
I experience the same thing on Fennec F-Droid 143.0.3 (Firefox) on Android 14.
Right, thanks for confirming. It seems firefox related. We'll get this patched asap!
I wonder if there's research into fitting gaussian splats that are dependent on focus distance? Basically as a way of modeling bokeh - you'd feed the raw, unstacked shots and get a sharp-everywhere model back.
Thanks for the links, that is great to know. I'm not quite sold if it's the better approach. You'd need to do SfM (tracking) on the out of focus images, which with macro subject can be really blurry, I don't know how well that works.. and a lot more of images too. You'd have group them somehow or preprocess.. then you're back to focus stacking first :-)
The linked paper describes a pipeline that starts with “point cloud from SfM” so they’re assuming away this problem at the moment.
Is it possible to handle SfM out of band? For example, by precisely measuring the location and orientation of the camera?
The paper’s pipeline includes a stage that identifies the in-focus area of an image. Perhaps you could use that to partition the input images. Exclusively use the in-focus areas for SfM, perhaps supplemented by out of band POV information, then leverage the whole image for training the splat.
Overall this seems like a slow journey to building end-to-end model pipelines. We’ve seen that in a few other domains, such as translation. It’s interesting to see when specialized algorithms are appropriate and when a unified neural pipeline works better. I think the main determinant is how much benefit there is to sharing information between stages.
Has recently been used to visit "The Matrix" again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho&t=1412
> Unfortunately, the extremely shallow depth of field in macro photography completely throws this process off. If you feed unsharp photos into it, the resulting model will contain unsharp areas as well.
Should be possible to model the focal depth of the camera directly. But perhaps that is not done in standard software. You still want several images with different focus settings
That's quite the improvement over Stars/NoooN [1] showing off real-time rendering of (supposedly) 23,806 triangles on a 486.
When was that made? The YouTube video is 14 years old but it feels at least a decade older than that.
Pinhole lens + high light/long exposures to get sharp focus may help avoid some of the extra processing steps, he does mention he shot small aperture and that can cause diffraction effects and I guess that might be worse with pinhole though.
The interactive rotatable demos work in realtime on my phone in browser! I guess gaussian spats aren't that expensive to render then, only to compute
The file sizes are impressive (as in small). I don't have the link right now but there are recent 4D splats that include motion (like videos but you can move around the scene) and they're in the megabytes.
How does it capture the reflection (the iridescence of the fly's body)? It's almost as if I can see the background through the reflection.
I would have thought that since that reflection has a different color in different directions, gaussian splat generation would have a hard time coming to a solution that satisfies all of the rays. Or at the very least, that a reflective surface would turn out muddy rather than properly reflective-looking.
Is there some clever trickery that's happening here, or am I misunderstanding something about gaussian splats?
Gaussian splats can have colour components that depend on the viewing direction. As far as I know, they are implemented as spherical harmonics. The angular resolution is determined by the number of spherical harmonic components. If this is too low, all reflection changes will be slow and smooth, and any reflection will be blurred.
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.
FTA, "A Gaussian splat is essentially a bunch of blurry ellipsoids. Each one has a view-dependent color". Does that explain it?
See the section titled "View-dependant colors with SH" here: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-overview-of-g...
It is remarkable that this is accomplished with relatively modest setup and effort, and the results are already great. Makes me wonder what you could get with high-end gear (e.g. 61mp sony a7rv and the new 100mm 1.4x macro) and capturing more frames. I also imagine that the web versions lose some detail to reduce size.
I presume these would look great on good vr headset?
The results are incredibly clean! Feathers and flowers could be interesting.
Black text on a dark grey background is nearly unreadable - I used Reader Mode.
Wow this would be lovely for my Drosophila lab.
Really amazing results.
I wonder if one could capture each angle in a single shot with a Lytro Illum instead of focus-stacking? Or is the output of an Illum not of sufficient resolution?
That would be awesome if it worked, from a curious look I can't say why not. I'll have to investigate a bit more. Thanks for bringing it up.
Amazing work, I especially love that you put all of them online to view. The bumblebee is my favorite, so fuzzy
I agree. The fine detail on the insects skin/shell is amazing.
I'd love to know the compute hardware he used and the time it took to produce.
Nothing fancy. Postshot does need a nvidia card though, I have a 3060Ti. A single insect, with around 5 million splats takes about 3 hours to train in high quality.
Educational visualization seems like a really good use case for GS
Cool! It looks awesome. I did see some "ghost legs" on the bumblebee. How does that sort of artifact happen?
The bumblebee was my first attempt, the tracking didn't quite work, so you get ghosting. Others too have ghosting, usually happens when part of the insect moves, while shooting (which takes 4h). They dry and crumble after a while.
Your fluid simulation was pretty rad.
This is awesome, thank you for sharing!