Show HN: Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame (blog.playcanvas.com)

58 points by yak32 3 days ago

11 comments:

by ulfen an hour ago

This for some reason reminded me of the "Killerspiele" debate [1] we had in Germany after a dramatic school shooting. The shooter had previously built a map of the school in Counter-Strike. With this it's not a long stretch from there to having a realistic map of a school... Which would have given him a better rating than the one he got for his map: "I'd like to see the school that actually has lighting like this." [2] Hopefully this tech will never used for something like this.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killerspiel [2] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/schuelerhobby-mapping-me...

by sev_verso 3 days ago

Plays decently smooth on my M4 Max. It's probably still a long way from being a production-ready replacement for meshed environments, but I could imagine a hybrid mode where certain elements like grass and shrubbery are drawn with gaussians, perhaps with support for basic procedural animation. Great work with the playable demo!

by reactordev an hour ago

For me, the biggest issue this solves is the blank canvas paralysis problem. Artists are visual thinkers and need a little nudge in the right (art) direction. This is a great way to fill that blank sheet of paper with something that they can take and run with.

by yak32 3 days ago

Thanks! Yeah hybrid is a way forward, dynamic stuff is not easy

by halflife an hour ago

I’m trying to understand from the video why this is better, it looks like a normal high resolution textures with precooked shadow maps.

It has no dynamic lighting or effects, which makes the video look like a high quality game from 2006.

by yak32 an hour ago

dynamic objects are still largely unsolved problem, I just tried to approach it in this demo. also this particular place doesn't have reflective surfaces, but technology supports it - check for example this splat https://superspl.at/scene/ff1d0393 or this one https://superspl.at/scene/6c822f84

by halflife 4 minutes ago

This is better, but I think that a demo with more reflections and radiosity would be much more impressive

by swiftcoder 3 hours ago

Sort of unfortunate that one ends up putting normal meshed characters that clash with the photorealistic splat environment

by dnnddidiej 2 hours ago

Probably for the best as, well, they are being pumped with lead.

by yak32 an hour ago

idealy it should be 4DGS but we are far away from it - real actors scan etc.. but somebody will do it later i am sure

by poly2it 2 hours ago

I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen when gaussian splatting can be combined with DLSS 5. Gaussian splatting has a lot of potential in video games yet to be realised.

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