This week I started practically looking into the Gaussian Splatting implimentation added in Houdini 21.
I used the sample project I got from a video tutorial earlier and went through it breaking dow how it all works. This sample project looks at creating a 3D mesh based on the points, running a vellum simulation on this mesh, then sending that animation data back onto the point cloud. While this is very interesting it will not be useful in my project.
Instead I want to use some kind of particle simulation or large scale animation on the point cloud, I tested a very basic popnet setup to see how the Gaussian Splat would react to it and everything seemed to work as expected.
Then I looked into the rendering setup. While the vast majority of processing such as camera tracking and reconstruction is done before the pointcloud is made, they still need to be set up in order to be viewed correctly. As each point is made up of essentially a coloured circle all the lighting and materials are not needed and can just be viewed as is. However it is still possible to relight a Gaussian Splat and change elements of the render, I might look into these further down the project.
After experimenting in Houdini and seeing what tools were available to me, I was able to go from ideas of a storyboard to getting a first idea down. As this project is focused more on research & development than storytelling my storyboard is very basic and essentially just consists of the “real world” transforming into data and becoming the digital world that isnt quite perfect yet. this project is very valuable to me as a chance to look into this new technology that is very quickly intergrating itself into upcoming professional workflows and especially in the music video industry where my passion lies.