I remember splatting being introduced as a way to capture real life scenes, but one of the links you have provided in this discusson seems to have used a traditional polygon mesh scene as training input for the splat model. How common is this and why would one do it that way over e.g. vertex shader effects that give the mesh a splatty aesthetic?
Yes, it's quite trivial to convert traditional CG to Gaussian splats. We can render our scenes/objects just as we would capture physical spaces. The additional benefits of using synthetic data is 100% accurate camera poses (alignment) which means the structure from motion (SfM) step can be bypassed.
It's also possible to splat from textured meshes directly, see: https://github.com/electronicarts/mesh2splat. This approach yields high quality, PBR compatible splats, but is not quite as efficient as a traditional training workflow. This approach will likely become mainstream in third party render engines, moving forward.
Why do this?
1. Consistent, streamlined visuals across a massive ecosystem, including content creation tools, the web, and XR headsets.
2. High fidelity, compressed visuals. With SOGs compression, splats are going to become the dominant 3D representation on the web (see https://superspl.at).
3. E-commerce (product visualizations, tours, real-estate, etc.)
4. Virtual production (replace green screens with giant LED walls).
5. View-dependent effects without (traditional) shaders or lighting
It's not just about the aesthetic, it's also about interoperability, ease of use, and the entire ecosystem.
