3 posts tagged with "gaussian-splats"

CLICK HERE to open in a new tab. Credits: Splats scanned at the V&A Museum. HDRI from Poly Haven.

We have big news for the 3D Gaussian Splat community - the PlayCanvas Editor now has fully integrated support for splats! Learn how to quickly build stunning, interactive 3DGS applications today.

The application above shows several splats assembled in a single application, with animation and post effects spicing up the visuals. Let's check out how it was built.

Step 1: Clean in SuperSplat 🧹​

After capturing the statues to PLY format, our first stop is SuperSplat, the open source tool for editing and optimizing 3D Gaussian Splats. Here, in a little over a minute, we can isolate the statue from the background and align it with the origin:

Once we are done, we can download the splat using our compressed PLY format. In this case, our downloaded PLY is only 1.56MB!

Step 2: Import into the Editor 🚧​

Now that we have a clean, compressed PLY, we simply need to drop it into the Editor's Asset Panel. And from there, drag it into the viewport to add it to the scene. Let's do that (along with a cube map for a photographic backdrop):

The PlayCanvas Editor is a powerful visual environment for building and publishing 3D scenes. You can:

• Grab useful scripts (and other assets) from the Asset Store. Here, we import an Orbit Camera script.
• Create beautiful user interfaces, using either HTML or PlayCanvas' built-in UI system.
• Add sound, physics, VR/AR support and much, much more.

Step 3: Add Animation and Post Effects ✨​

What really makes the demo pop is the transitions that fade the statues in and out.

With the Editor, you can customize the shader code that renders your splats to apply stunning animation effects. For the transition between statues, individual splats are transformed and recolored over time, while a full-screen bloom effect is ramped up and down.

Resources​

Today's release makes working with 3D Gaussian Splats both easy and fun! We've shown you how to build a virtual gallery or museum but the possibilities are endless. With 3D Gaussian Splats in the PlayCanvas Editor, you can target many verticals: product visualization (furniture, clothing, consumer electronics), automotive, education, travel and so much more.

To get started, here is an useful list of resources:

• Statue Project - feel free to fork it, explore and experiment.
• 3D Gaussian Splatting User Guide
• SuperSplat (don't forget to install the PWA)

Go Forth and Create​

We hope you love today's update as much as we do! ❤️

But let us know what you think by heading over to the forum or ping us on X!

Today, we are announcing the latest release of SuperSplat, the open source tool for editing and optimizing 3D Gaussian Splats. If you don't have a PLY file to hand, here's an example!

Version 0.17.1 focuses on two key areas: performance and PWA support.

Performance Improvements​

SuperSplat is now over 2x faster on the GPU! 🏃

Compare before and after (notice GPU time dropping from 32ms to 13.5ms for the bike scene):

This is thanks to the v1.71.0 release of the PlayCanvas Engine, which includes a dramatic overhaul of how splats are processed by the GPU. For the technical details, take a look at this pull request.

The result is that SuperSplat can now throw around millions of splats and still maintain a silky smooth frame rate. Try it for yourself!

PWA Support​

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web application that provides a native app-like experience, including the ability to install it on a user's home screen or desktop.

From today, SuperSplat is shipping with PWA support! 🎉

To install SuperSplat as a PWA:

1. Visit https://playcanvas.com/supersplat/editor.
2. Hit the Install SuperSplat button in the address bar.

PLY File Association​

With SuperSplat installed as a PWA, your operating system can now open launch PLY files directly into the tool. Simply right-click on a PLY file and select SuperSplat to open it.

You can also set SuperSplat as the default tool to open your PLYs. Then, you can simply double-click a PLY file to open it instantly in SuperSplat!

Your Feedback Matters​

We hope you love today's update! ❤️

The SuperSplat community has grown a lot in recent weeks and we want to get your feedback. What other features would you like the PWA to get? Are you still experiencing any performance problems? What is still missing from SuperSplat? Let us know by heading over to the forum or ping us on X!

Introduction​

3D Gaussian Splatting is a new method for digitizing and rendering real world objects. With gaussian splatting, you can digitize a scene from a few photos using services like Luma Labs or Polycam. These services take the set of photos and generate a 3d Gaussian Splat scene in PLY format.

For example, this is a Gaussian Splat scene rendered in PlayCanvas.

What is a Splat?​

Gaussian Splat Scenes are not made up of polygons and textures. Instead, they are made up of many (up to millions) of individual, unconnected blobs called splats. A splat is just a particle in space with size, orientation, color and opacity.

Below you can see a single brown splat selected. The splat bounding box shows its orientation and size:

The gaussian part of the name comes from the shape of splat itself: the splat opacity has a gaussian falloff from its center to its edge.

Engine Support​

The PlayCanvas team has been adding support to the engine for loading and rendering Gaussian Splat PLY files:

Since the resulting files are often messy and require cleaning, we released SuperSplat, a tool for cleaning and processing gaussian splat PLY files:

PLY Format​

However, the default gaussian splat PLY format as exported by training tools is large.

This is because the uncompressed format stores a large amount of data per splat:

Name	Data Format	Bytes
Position	3 x float	12
Orientation	4 x float	16
Scale	3 x float	12
Spherical harmonics / color	48 x float	192
Total		232

For example, the original guitar.ply scene file takes 132.8 MB (32 MB excluding spherical harmonic data).

Compressed PLY Format​

So we introduced a compressed PLY format for use in runtime applications. The compressed PLY file format ignores the unused spherical harmonic data and stores the rest of the elements in quantized integers.

The format can be summarized as follows:

• Split the scene into chunks of 256 splats
• For each chunk, store the min and max (x, y, z) for position and scale in floating point
• For each splat in the chunk, store a normalized and quantized value for position and scale (relative to chunk extents) and orientation and color

This data layout results in the following data per chunk:

Name	Data Format	Bytes
Position bound	6 x float	24
Scale bound	6 x float	24
Total		48

And the following data per splat:

Name	Data Format	Bytes
Position	uint32 (11, 10, 11)	4
Orientation	uint32 (2, 10, 10, 10)	4
Scale	uint32 (11, 10, 11)	4
Color	uint32 (8, 8, 8, 8)	4
Total		16

As a result, the compressed version of guitar.ply takes only 8.7 MB.

Do It Yourself​

The easiest way to generate a compressed PLY file yourself is using the SuperSplat tool. Load the PLY file into SuperSplat and export it again using the 'Compressed Ply File' option:

If you are interested in the file format specifics, see this code which demonstrates how to decompress the file data.

See this editor project for an example of loading and rendering a compressed gaussian splat PLY file. Or you can run it here.

Summary and Future​

We have introduced a new compressed PLY format for gaussian splatting which is roughly 4x smaller than uncompressed data and can be used in realtime applications.

In future we hope to:

• store splats hierarchically for optimized rendering and culling
• implement realtime splat LOD
• test skinning and animation of gaussian splats
• further compress gaussian splat data
• optimize WebGPU rendering

References​

The compressed format is largely based on the fine work of Aras Pranckevičius and his blog posts.