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Splatting for volume rendering is quite old - Westover, Lee Alan (July 1991). "SPLATTING: A Parallel, Feed-Forward Volume Rendering Algorithm"

by eloop 3y ago

andybak 3y ago
Are you saying there's nothing new in this or that it's building on an already established approach? I think the latter is not something anyone is trying to hide - while the former doesn't seem correct.
- corysama 3y ago
  What’s new in the paper is the technique to generate the gaussians from photos. The output that is used to render uses a technique that is a decade or three old, but not terribly practical until recently. For me, a rendering guy, that’s great! The data used at render time is very simple and flexible. Simpler than triangles even when you get into non-trivial operations.
  - andybak 3y ago
    Is the decades-old type of splatting view-dependent still?
    - corysama 3y ago
      The view-dependent bit reflects the simplicity of the data. The data is similar to an oriented, stretchy box that you interpret as an oriented, stretchy, fuzzy ball (the Gaussian field). What you do from there is up to you. Classically, researchers were interested in just using the splats at all. So, they just assigned a single color to each one. This paper assigns a spherical harmonic-based color sphere instead. That gives it the view angle -> color function. There is a second paper focused on moving splats. It just uses solid colored splats. You could instead associate albedo/specular/roughness from real time materials and do real time lighting. But, you’d have to figure out how to generate/capture those values.
nsajko 3y ago
Yeah, it seems like the authors of the new paper may have missed much relevant existing research?
- tayistay 3y ago
  They haven't. You can't get a paper into SIGGRAPH that misses relevant existing research.
mikhailfranco 3y ago
Yes, I used to think of it as throw Gaussian snowballs at the window and see what sticks. P.S. Not sure where the insight came from, but I was living near Boston at the time, and had young children :)

Splatting for volume rendering is quite old - Westover, Lee Alan (July 1991). "SPLATTING: A Parallel, Feed-Forward Volume Rendering Algorithm"

by eloop 3y ago

Splatting for volume rendering is quite old - Westover, Lee Alan (July 1991). "SPLATTING: A Parallel, Feed-Forward Volume Rendering Algorithm"

andybak 3y ago

Are you saying there's nothing new in this or that it's building on an already established approach? I think the latter is not something anyone is trying to hide - while the former doesn't seem correct.

corysama 3y ago
What’s new in the paper is the technique to generate the gaussians from photos. The output that is used to render uses a technique that is a decade or three old, but not terribly practical until recently. For me, a rendering guy, that’s great! The data used at render time is very simple and flexible. Simpler than triangles even when you get into non-trivial operations.
- andybak 3y ago
  Is the decades-old type of splatting view-dependent still?
  - corysama 3y ago
    The view-dependent bit reflects the simplicity of the data. The data is similar to an oriented, stretchy box that you interpret as an oriented, stretchy, fuzzy ball (the Gaussian field). What you do from there is up to you. Classically, researchers were interested in just using the splats at all. So, they just assigned a single color to each one. This paper assigns a spherical harmonic-based color sphere instead. That gives it the view angle -> color function. There is a second paper focused on moving splats. It just uses solid colored splats. You could instead associate albedo/specular/roughness from real time materials and do real time lighting. But, you’d have to figure out how to generate/capture those values.

nsajko 3y ago

Yeah, it seems like the authors of the new paper may have missed much relevant existing research?

tayistay 3y ago
They haven't. You can't get a paper into SIGGRAPH that misses relevant existing research.

mikhailfranco 3y ago

Yes, I used to think of it as throw Gaussian snowballs at the window and see what sticks. P.S. Not sure where the insight came from, but I was living near Boston at the time, and had young children :)