Posted by amlib 5 hours ago
Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.
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.
At one point it used triangles for the large splats, and still compute shaders for the small ones due to quad overdraw. I'm not sure if the final version stuck with that or went all compute, but quad complexity is also why nanite does compute shaders for small triangles and traditional rasterization for the larger ones.
But it's a bit difficult to find the exact reason since profilers won't really tell you a concrete bottleneck when drawing vast amounts of tiny tris.
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...
runs on a phone: https://storage.googleapis.com/jax3d-public/projects/mobilen...
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
But again, I've really only super superficial understanding of this, I just understood it like that back then
I learned about gaussian splattering mere months before nanite was introduced and their technical talks and articles always sounded exactly like what I just learned about the splattering, that's why I got that impression
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
They have easy subscription options, even a monthly coffee adds up! Thanks!
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.
Thanks!
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.