Printing Gaussian Splats
patreon.com239 points by ilnmtlbnm 3 days ago
239 points by ilnmtlbnm 3 days ago
Incredible. I may be the only one in the dark, but until this moment I had no idea 3D printing at this high a fidelity was possible. It looks like a real bee.
Last I knew, the best 3D prints still looked like hardened play dough
It's different kinds of printers. That's a resin printer - pretty high-end one. I'm not getting that result on my Bambu P1S.
But how does resin do colors?
UV Inkjet.
HeyGears is releasing a prosumer full color UV inkjet resin printer this year for < $2K: https://store.heygears.com/products/heygears-g1-direct
Well, to actually 3D print looks like it’s $3300, but still that’s really incredible! Seems substantially less messy than the resin printers I played around with a few years ago.
One approach is to just print CMYK resin like an inkjet printer (and then cure it with UV).
Do that hundreds or thousands of times and you eventually get Z height.
Look up the EufyMake E1 for a consumer/prosumer version.
The EufiMake isn't really a 3D printer though. It's more a normal printer that can do an embossed/textured print.
I do a lot of 3D printing and I had no idea either. I did some searching and this printer is as big as a work bench and likely costs around $200,000.
Same. This is insane, I had no idea!
There's nothing I personally want to bring, but these would make AMAZING gifts, cool things for your desk/bookcase, etc.
There have got to be so many interesting, educational, and cultural objects you could print like this, and the fact you can "blow up" an object like a insect is even cooler.
Depending on the price, this feels like something that could take off in a big way.
How much are the prints approximately? Can't see a price anywhere.
Not sure, but this will be cheap soon and invading trinket shops everywhere for sure!
What is the 3d printing technique being used here? I can’t intuitively recognize it.
Resin, on one of these big expensive Stratasys machines: https://www.stratasys.com/en/3d-printers/printer-catalog/pol...
so they buy and operate the machine, the customer brings the splat. is this just a print lab?
Looks like it. Plus it looks like they’re closer to a traditional screen sprinting shop in that they just take a file and will work with you manually tweak and adjust things to look good, rather than just printing a file straight away
I remember seeing a 3d printer that was essentially a 2d printer which printed the surface and cut the outline and then laminated the sheets together which depending on the paper used would get you a block of something between mdf and plywood with high surface detail imagery.
I would imagine much the same approach could be done by laminating clear plastic sheets if you can maintain the transparencey without bubbles. It would get you modern colour printer resolution in two dimensions and sheet thickness in the other.
It wouldn't surprise me if some smart cookie could make a resin printer with a resin that sets in a state reflecting different wavelengths depending on how you zap it. That's a problem left for the reader.
You could easily release pigment into resin just before it gets hardened, but getting the right pigment to the right place would be hard, A print head zapping back and forth inside the liquid doesn't sound like it would be viable.
Printing in resin bottom to top part could allow a colour print head to fly over the surface printing a pigment layer then squirting the next layer of resin on top, zap and repeat.
Definitely ready to try this. Some scifi stuff
Very cool product! And to think, in one of the many prior gaussian splatting threads someone declared there was no way anyone could build a business around the technique.
To be fair, if they first vocalize it they could just use Sparse Voxels which is my favorite differentiable rendering technique https://github.com/NVlabs/svraster
I find the workflow of fitting Gaussian splats and then immediately turning them into voxels to be rather surprising, too. I can imagine some performance benefits at large scale, or maybe a reduced tendency to generate certain types of artifacts, but going straight to voxels seems more straightforward.
This is insanely cool. My wallet is ready.
Fantastic work!
I want buy one.