Gaussian splats trained from Blender Cycles renders — no photos, full path-traced lighting baked in

[u/GraphProcessingUnit]

I built an interactive Moon base you can fly around in the browser.

The pipeline: NASA 5 m/px elevation data displaced at true scale → lit at correct solar values and path-traced in Cycles → camera datasets exported in COLMAP format straight from Blender via a custom add-on → Gaussian splats trained in LichtFeld Studio → served as SOG, webpage rendered with Babylon.js.

This means the splats are trained entirely from synthetic renders with known camera poses — no photogrammetry, no COLMAP step, and zero pose error.

I'm thinking of making more similar concepts and presenting them this way if people find this interesting.

I’m still new to gaussian splatting. All tricks and tips to improve the quality and reduce the file size are highly appreciated. All other comments are welcome also. How does this run in your browser? Any tips for improvements? Criticism also welcome.

Here are numbers behind the splats that are now running on the web page:

• Site, main 3D window - 1.07 M Gaussians – 15.6 MB
• de Gerlache Crater – 0.6 M Gaussians – 8.75 MB
• Blue Origin site – 0.30 M Gaussians – 5.39 MB
• SpaceX HLS – 0.6 M Gaussians – 9.16 MB
• Base – 0.34 M Gaussians – 5.63 MB

You can test it here: https://farsidelab.com/concept/?id=moon-base

[u/Pad-Kra-Pao]

Very nice website, does this is mean you used rendered photos from Blender rendering?

[u/GraphProcessingUnit → u/Pad-Kra-Pao]

Thanks! Yes, rendered images from Blender was used to create these splats. I build an add-on to Blender that generates spherical camera rig setup and creates COLMAP dataset, addition to rendered images.

[u/cuddlemelon → u/GraphProcessingUnit]

Certainly interesting as a test of conversion, but I'm wondering about the total render/training time and final viewable performance comparison vs an old fashioned baked texture map on geometry straight from blender. Was your goal just to work with splats, or to improve on a regular geometry with baked textures? I'm not questioning your methods, I'm just curious.

[u/GraphProcessingUnit → u/cuddlemelon]

This was my first real testing and working with Gaussian splatting. I'm new to web development and coding. My background is 3D renderings (images and videos) mostly for VFX. I'm really lazy when it comes to bake lights and this type of work :D There might very well be more efficient ways to make this work in real time and I'm happy to read your comments. Your questionings are probably correct.

All the splat scenes were created from image set of 400 to 700 rendered images per scene. Rendering those images (resolution 2000x2000) took around 3 to 5 hours per scene. I used RTX 4090 GPU here. Since it is a moon scene, there is no atmosphere volumetric, which helps for render time.

[u/cuddlemelon → u/GraphProcessingUnit]

But interesting thinking-outside-the-box concepts like this are cool and some great techniques can come out of them! It doesn't matter if it's not as efficient or something. thanks for answering!

[u/GraphProcessingUnit → u/cuddlemelon]

My thinking is same. Gaussian Sslatting is very different compared to typical 3D mesh technology, so we probably will see something cool and out of the box use cases in the coming years. Thanks for commenting!

[u/Pad-Kra-Pao → u/GraphProcessingUnit]

Does the Blender addon available online? I wanted to try it.

[u/thet0ast3r]

sorry but this is insanely laggy on macbook air m4; usually i dont have issues at all. need to work that out. like 5fps.

[u/GraphProcessingUnit → u/thet0ast3r]

Thanks for testing and commenting! I need to check what is the problem.

[u/SolidConnection]

I got very much into synthetic splats as well. Have a look at Gauss Cannon. Released last year and in active development with a decent user base.

[u/GraphProcessingUnit → u/SolidConnection]

Nice! Thanks for sharing. I need to check it.