Learn 3D splats by taking them apart
A Gaussian splat is a 3D scene made of nothing but soft, coloured, see-through blobs. Learn what one blob is, then pile up thousands and pull real scenes to pieces.
Thirteen lessons, from one blob to a walking creature
- One blob
Five kinds of number, 14 in all, make one Gaussian. Pull each one and see what it does.
- Footprint
A 3D blob lands on screen as a 2D ellipse. Orbit it and watch the shadow it casts change.
- Order matters
See-through blobs only blend right when drawn back to front. Draw them in the wrong order.
- Many make a shape
From one blob to twenty thousand: when does a pile of blobs become a solid object?
- Colour by angle
A blob that changes colour as you walk round it, and how many numbers that takes.
- Paint
Spray blobs onto the floor by hand, and trade blob size against how many you need.
- Splat files
The same scene saved three ways: what a splat file holds, and how small it can get.
- Break it
Shrink every blob to a dot, blow the scene apart, and put it back exactly.
- One bone
A bone moves blobs it never touches. Bend a caterpillar and find out which ones follow.
- Weights
Bend an arm and the elbow tears. Fix it without moving a bone.
- Twist without tearing
Turn a wrist over two ways, and see why one of them squashes the blobs flat.
- Walk cycle
Four poses and some timing make a walk. Find the ones that matter, and stop the feet sliding.
- Blobs to a model
Save the walking fox as splats and as a solid mesh, and see what each one keeps.
Sandbox
Spray, select, move, recolour and explode blobs, or open your own .ply, .spz, .splat, .ksplat or .sog capture. Open the sandbox
Other ways to play with splats
- Creature
A fox made of blobs that trots on our own splat engine. Make it big or small, then take it away as a rigged 3D model for Blender or a game engine.
- Fit a Picture
Watch a few hundred blobs start as noise and train themselves into a picture, live in your browser. It is the same loop that turns photos into a splat, in 2D.
- Splat to Sprite
Frame a splat like a game camera and bake it into palette-locked pixel-art sprite sheets, walking in four directions.