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Thanks! Notice 12MB steak sandwich is the biggest of them all. Rest are Fancier compression methods are coming (e.g SOGS). This is 30MB! https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/
How much of the huge file size is because you need tons of splats to simulate a hard surface? Conceptually the splats seems flawed because gaussians don't have hard edges - they literally go to infinity in all directions, just at vanishingly small densities. So practically everybody cuts them off at 3 sigma or something, which covers 99.7% of the volume. But real-world objects have hard edges, and splats don't. Would…
I agree with you though that in general 3DGS is a worse representation for hard, flat, synthetic things with hard edges. But in the flip side, I would argue it's a better representation for many organic, real-world things, like imagine fur or hair or leaves on a tree... These are things that can render beautifully photo realistically in a way that would require much, much more complex polygon geometry and texturing and careful sorting and blending of semi-transparent texels. This is one reason why 3DGS has become so popular in scanning and 3D reconstruction.. you just get much better results with smaller file sizes. When 3DGS first appeared, everyone was shocked by how photorealistic you could render things in real time on a mobile device!
But one final thought I want to add: with Spark it's not an either/or. You can have BOTH in the same Three.js scene and they will blend together perfectly via the Z-buffer. So you can scan the world around you and render it with 3DGS, and then insert your hard-edged robot character polygon meshes right into that world, and get the best of both!