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bhouston | on: Show HN: SuperSplat – open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor
This is neat but Splats are not really mean to be edited in this way.

Splats are sort of like byte code, they are the compiled and optimized representation of reflected light as semi-transparent guassians.

Or you can think of them as the PDF equivalent of a Google or Word Doc. All the logic is gone, and you just have final optimized results.

Generally when you edit PDFs, the results are not great and you cannot make major edits because the layout won't reflow, etc.

So while this is cool, I don't think it will take off unless there is another innovation in terms of either using AI to "reflow" the lighting and surfaces after an edit, or inferring more directly the underlying representations (true surface properties and the light sources.)

ovenchips | parent | next
Hi Ben! I would argue that it is very useful for splats to be edited in this way. I couldn't have built this application without SuperSplat for isolating, cleaning, transforming and optimizing/compressing the PLY:

https://playcanv.as/e/p/cLkf99ZV/

Integrating AI is an interesting topic and something that certainly has potential.

bhouston | root | parent | next
I 100% agree with:

- cleaning up noisy GuassianSplats is useful. There are often stragglers floating around in space that need to get deleted.

- compression/optimizing them is useful.

This being a cleanup and compression tool makes sense, but I guess I don't call that an "editor."

I guess I was more arguing against the idea that this is a viable "editor" where one can combine and manipulate in more radical ways Gaussian Splats. The current technological approach doesn't make this a feasible use case.

ovenchips | root | parent
Coming very soon is:

- Copy & Paste: e.g. delete a tree and fill the hole with a copied patch of grass

- Color Adjustments: tinting, brightness, etc.

If these aren't editing ops, I don't know what is. :) Sure, you _could_ go back and recapture photogrammetry or rerun training, but that's super costly in terms of time. SuperSplat lets you make simple edits quickly and easily.

jobigoud | root | parent
In theory if you delete something you have to recompute global illumination and remove cast shadows in the immediate environment of the removed object, but that information is baked in the gaussian splats. I think that's the kind of limitation the parent comment is talking about.
ovenchips | root | parent
To be as accurate as possible, yes, you need to consider lighting/shadows. But trust me, in many circumstances, you can copy+paste gaussians and it looks 'good enough'. It depends on the scene and the edit you want to make.
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kfarr | parent | next
I guess in theory what you say could be correct, however in practice this tool has been very helpful for client work of editing, cleaning, cropping and even slight modification of Gaussian splats. I could see a similar argument for raster images in general -- they are hard to edit as you're modifying individual pixels and it's not efficient, but we've seen tools grow from MS Paint to modern Photoshop to become very useful. I think the same could be said here -- it's just early and we're at the "bytecode" level as you say.
slimbuck | parent | next
I'm not really sure what you mean. Think of SuperSplat as the photoshop of gaussian splats?

- SuperSplat dev :)

bufferoverflow | parent | next
That's a ridiculous take. Generated splats almost always have garbage parts that need to be truncated. An editor is absolutely needed for that.
yorwba | parent | next
There are already approaches to infer bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs, the "true surface properties") and lights: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/
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yapyap | parent
great metaphor, thanks!
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