Blender 5.3 released with Gaussian Splat support (blender.org)

362 points by amlib 5 hours ago

Retro_Dev 5 hours ago

Every time I hear about Gaussian splatting, I think about triangle splatting[0] - GPUs were built to render triangles, so I wonder what games would be like if we supported generating and rendering them as much as we do Gaussian splats.

[0] https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

guitarlimeo 5 hours ago

The Dreams game engine (only for PS4) does this and is able to achieve scenes that no other game engine can. Here's a technical talk about how they did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.

mrandish 4 hours ago

The Sony Dreams beta in 2018, was truly revolutionary and even today the world hasn't caught up with a lot of its breakthroughs. I'd been deeply involved in the design of high-end, pro digital media authoring tools for two decades and when I saw that beta it blew my fucking mind.

Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet) spent over 8 years creating Dreams, which would never have happened without Sony's funding, but the tragedy was forcing what could have been a brilliant high-end authoring tool into a gamepad / lean-back interface. Even now, there are still innovative UX approaches in Dreams that could be adapted into high-end 2D, 3D, compositing and animation tools like Blender.

Boxxed 5 hours ago

Pretty sure they use SDFs, not triangle or gaussian splatting

debugnik 5 hours ago

guitarlimeo 5 hours ago

cma 2 hours ago

sorenjan 5 hours ago

They've made a follow up to that called MeshSplatting. https://meshsplatting.github.io/

lambda 5 hours ago

I think that Gaussian splatting is generally better, as the Gaussians are smoother and easier to optimize, if you can use them.

Things like triangle splatting are useful if you have to integrate into an engine that only support triangles. But with modern graphics pipelines, you can implement Gaussians quite efficiently, including newer techniques like Gaussian point splatting that can scale up seamlessly to enormous scenes:

* Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AWv_nIfp-U

* Paper: https://jorisar.nl/gaussian_point_splatting/gaussian_point_s...

* Repo: https://github.com/JorisAR/gaussian-point-splatting

WithinReason an hour ago

xscott 2 hours ago

Yeah, there were other splats before Gaussian splats, so lots of cool possibilities depending on the style you're after. However, hard triangles have hard edges, and then you might be anti-aliasing those edges in some way. Gaussian splats can just be a triangle or two where the pixel shader feathers towards the edges.

ffsm8 4 hours ago

Isn't nanite in unreal engine exactly that?

To be clear, I'm not proficient in it's use, just watched a few videos about it's theory when it was initially announced

cyanmagenta 2 hours ago

No, nanite is just having different levels of detail for objects, and which LOD gets selected is done automatically by the engine. So users can use ultra-high-def models (including 3d scans of real-world objects), and the engine automatically generates and uses lower polygon versions for when the object is far away or whatever.

ffsm8 an hour ago

weryberl5 4 hours ago

Honestly there should be many more types of splatting imo...

zokier 2 hours ago

Beta splatting seems pretty promising. It addresses the fuzziness aspect of gaussians among other things.

https://rongliu-leo.github.io/universal-beta-splatting/

https://linus-franke.com/hibs/

cubefox 3 hours ago

There are various papers on variants of Gaussian splatting (keyword "differential rendering") which replace the Gaussians with some other explicit geometric representation that can also be rendered in real time. A triangle soup is just one example. I recall one which uses some sort of tetrahedral foam instead.

mturk 5 hours ago

Bundle support in geometry nodes is huge for complex pipelines and workflows, particularly when combined with lists and closures. I have been running on the alpha builds to get access to them in my workflows.

It took me a while to properly understand it, but it's genuinely great. It maps so much more of what I expect from traditional coding, scripting etc into the visual paradigm and makes an awful lot easier to use.

Also, should out to databpy and nodebpy, both of which are indispensable and make using nodes and blender so much nicer:

https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/databpy https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/nodebpy

guidopallemans 4 hours ago

Tried the beta on my M4 a couple of weeks ago on a scene of 4M splats (exported from spirula studio, great tool) , and found that it's immediately very mature, fast, and well-integrated. I could not find anyinconstencies with the rest of the interface. Congrats to the team!

unshavedyak 4 hours ago

If you enjoy or get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/

They have easy subscription options, even a monthly coffee adds up! Thanks!

utopiah 23 minutes ago

Even works in XR, tried on Frame just yesterday https://video.benetou.fr/w/1z3RE28EGWB7ZeeAgdCaEY and don't trust the low FPS capture, was quite smooth.

load-bearing 5 hours ago

Interesting discussion from start of this year of one of the first popular music videos made with this technology. Some decent explanations in there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670024

PyWoody 5 hours ago

Wow, that video made me instantly nauseous.

Groxx 5 hours ago

If you'd like a somewhat more sedate example: https://youtu.be/J1-yToxKOzI

Their LazyPosy channel has a video about how they made this one, difficulties, etc if you're interested in that too. More practical than technical, though it wasn't done with Blender.

dvh 4 hours ago

You show something to your boss, he pats you on the shoulder and says "Perfect! Just move chairs 2 feet left and ship it". How does one do it with gaussian splats?

pfg_ 20 minutes ago

You select the points involved in the chair and move them and then you fix the holes in the floor. Gaussian splats are just 3D point clouds with a bunch of extra values per point.

andybak 20 minutes ago

With about the same amount of ease as if you'd used photogrammetry - which is very widely used in game pipelines

derac 4 hours ago

I have seen techniques for smart selecting objects and moving them around in the scene.

gregsadetsky 5 hours ago

Does anyone have recommendations for video / 4d splats? Are there softwares / techniques to check out? How to record, render, etc.

Thanks!

originalvichy 4 hours ago

I am a fan of this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RadianceFields

He is very frequently posting news about the splat world as well as quite many tests and demos with different software or hardware. I would expect him to cover Blender specific stuff soon, but it's a great source already for existing stuff.

adventured 26 minutes ago

Minimax H3 can do orbit videos + splats very well.

devy 5 hours ago

Apparently, while Gaussian splatting is not the core technique for all world models, it has become a dominant representation and rendering backend for spatial and reconstructive world models.

jfrei 5 hours ago

Pretty cool that Gaussian Splatting is included in Blender. It always amazes me how many (sometimes pretty hidden) features Blender provides while still being rather a lean piece of software. I believe though that Gaussian Splatting is not ideal for getting well-structured mesh data with limited vertices for typical video game usage. I'm wondering where this is going in the future.

hermitShell 5 hours ago

We are converging on text specification to 3D world. Gaussian Splat technology doesn't get as much hype as it deserves. The killer app for VR headsets is still to come.

aurareturn 5 hours ago

For those who use Blender for work, how far are models like Astra away from using Blender to create something good enough at a junior, senior level?

commieneko 4 hours ago

I've been using Claude to drive Blender with the official Blender MCP server. Mixed results; but some of them very good.

Claude Opus is very good at creating geometry nodes for specific applications. You have to know what to ask for. It's not a magic genie.

For example, I asked it to make a node setup to create the geometry for a table. It did a mediocre job of it. Then I told it to do research on the nomenclature for tables and create a parametric control interface to generate tables with the UI using the table nomenclature. It did a very good job of that. It set it up so that I could put the units in using Imperial or metric. I also asked it to come up with reasonable default values for the parameters and it did. With just a little tweaking I have a very useful table generator for greyboxing scenes.

I then did a similar round with it for book cases and straightback chairs with useful results.

I asked it to make material nodes for wood: oak, maple, etc. And it did a pretty good job of that. Nothing amazing, but a useful place to start.

It won't be replacing people that know what they are doing, but its useful for giving that person better specifications for what you want.

I had Claude keep notes on the project and it made a skill that has been useful for later projects.

Think of it as a very bright intern that works very fast but has very little practical experience.

The problem, of course, is that if AI replaces interns, then there may not be a future generation of experts. By then, though, the AIs may be good enough to replace the experts. Next year? Next week? Who knows. If you guide it right to learn as it works, it _does_ get better over time.

I have no idea what to expect or what the actual limits of this tech is. I've see it make really hilarious mistakes, then turn around and explain the math its using so well that I can ask for what I want "properly" and it's surprised that that was what I really wanted.

It is like dealing with a very well read alien.

If the AIs don't end up murdering us all in our sleep it could be an amazing world we are entering.

mrandish 3 hours ago

> By then, though, the AIs may be good enough to replace the experts. Next year? Next week? Who knows.

Lately, I've been pondering this question in general and I'm worried the answer might be "Never" for some kinds of work - at least if we don't change how LLMs are currently developed and improved. At a high-level, the problem is they don't 'learn on the job' like a human and writing their memory & learning in .md files works for some things but fails for others.

While the 'rising tide' of baseline LLM knowledge continues to grow, they are still FTIs (Factory Trained Intelligences), meaning they mostly learn from data which can be assembled/tagged or synthesized in mass bulk - plus specific abilities in certain domains which the factory has prioritized for more costly special training. For some broad categories of important work, I suspect there's a significant unfilled gap in our LLM instances being able to effectively crystallize knowledge acquired on-task. Without that, context files will remain helpful crutches not true substitutes.

commieneko 3 hours ago

anakaine 2 hours ago

bachittle 5 hours ago

Fable 5.2 is really good at using Blender from my testing. That being said, even smaller models are good enough for junior level work, it just depends on what deliverable or metric you are looking at. Most agentic LLMs can now do low poly assets for example.

maccard 3 hours ago

Could you share any assets and prompts?

a34729t 5 hours ago

Blender can be guided with Opus 5.5 to do reasonably detailed buildings and generate textures, and modify existing models, say a car, and add doors. There is still a lot of handholding, but it's good enough!

sehw 4 hours ago

We don't use "AI" for serious work.

guipsp 4 hours ago

Tade0 4 hours ago

I don't know a about Blender, but frontier models already do a good job generating scenes in Three.js:

https://threejseval.com/

tmpz22 4 hours ago

Most of these platforms support scripting, meaning software development strategies can be applied to iteratively developing graphics etc.

Though with some graphic design tools you have to proxy it with AppleScript because there is no other automatable interface with the design tool.

colechristensen 5 hours ago

More skilled technology users get better results when asking LLMs to do technology things.

baxuz 4 hours ago

Wanted to get into GS for 2 years already, and I have no idea where to even start. It's such a fast-paced field.

dmarcos 27 minutes ago

I help maintain https://sparkjs.dev/ Nice way to ease into it and community to help out.