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Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

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Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#211
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Is it possible you didn’t comprehend which parts were 3D? Or if you did, perhaps a critique is better rather than just a low effort diss.

I viewed on a flat monitor, so perhaps I missed some 4D and 5D too.

/i

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#212
post #77
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they talk about this in the article and that’s exactly what they did.

It wasn't clear to me how much this was intentional vs. being the limits of the technology at the moment.

I guess the technology still has some quality limitations, otherwise we would already see it in mainstream movies, e.g. to simulate smooth camera motions beyond what is achievable with video stabilization. It's much more difficult to achieve 4K quality that holds up on a movie theater screen, without visible artifacts, than to do an artistic music video.

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#213

Hi, I'm David Rhodes, Co-founder of CG Nomads, developer of GSOPs (Gaussian Splatting Operators) for SideFX Houdini. GSOPs was used in combination with OTOY OctaneRender to produce this music video. If you're interested in the technology and its capabilities, learn more at https://www.cgnomads.com/ or AMA. Try GSOPs yourself: https://github.com/cgnomads/GSOPs (example content included).

I’m fascinated by the aesthetic of this technique. I remember early versions that were completely glitched out and presented 3d clouds of noise and fragments to traverse through. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about creatively ‘abusing’ this tech? Perhaps misaligning things somehow or using some wrong inputs.

https://youtu.be/eyAVWH61R8E?t=3m53s

Superman is what comes to mind for this

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#214
So sad that nobody thought it important to ELI5 whatever on earth "gaussian splatting" means, and how it's different than regular splatting (if there's such a thing), or regular video. To me the video looks like the figures have slightly rounder edges, that's all.

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#216
post #207

> many viewers focused on the chaos, the motion, and the unmistakable early MTV energy of the piece It certainly moves around a lot! It certainly looks like the tech and art style here are indissociable. Not only the use of Gaussian Splats made such extreme camera movement possible, one can be argued that it made them necessary. Pause the video and notice the blurriness and general lack of details. But the frantic mo…

Kinda, it all depends on platforms and eras. As a demoscener I see more of techdemo, indiedev and "game-mods" vibes in much of it (especially certain kinds of jankiness feel of visuals in some parts that demosceners doing more high end in general try to avoid but is more meme-worthy in game-mods/indiedev circles). Demos often aim for a bit more clean visuals (and palettes), blurriness is often tuned in another way.

Sadly, much of the demoscene is in a bit of a navel-grazing retro computing phase, many active ones today are "returners" from the C64 and Amiga eras whilst PC sceners of the 90s either dropped off for money, games or kids.

It's also the sheer work-effort, demoscene in the 90s and early 00s could focus on rendering while visual art pipelines didn't matter as much, as graphics cards got better it was obvious that the scene was falling behind the cutting edge games (both in asset due to workload and hacks required for graphics cards to render realistically).

The introduction and early popularization of SDF rendering turned the scene a bit more relevant again, but it's also been masking a certain lack of good artists since programmers could create nice renderings without needing assets.

However, to match something like this video in creativity would require a lot of asset workload (and non-trival rendering), and that combo is not really that common today sadly.

Funnily enough, I was actually discussing just Gaussian Splatting as a solution for more "asset heavy" demos about a year ago with another scener friend, but sadly there's a tad of a stigma culturally as NN/"AI" methods has been fairly controversial within the scene, aside from programmers there are both visual and music artists, and among those camps it's not really a popular thing.

It's still mostly a method though, and SDF rendering + GS could in the end be a saviour in disguise for the scene to go beyond just rendering and bring back a bit more story-telling to the scene.

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#217

This reminds me about how Soulja Boy just used a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and a cheap microphone and recorded all his songs that made him millions.[1] Edit: Ok this was a big team of VFX producers who did this. Still, prices are coming down dramatically in general, but yeah that idea is a bit of an underfit to this case. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rjhVe59ek

The whole rap/hip-hop scene got jump-started by 1977 NYC blackout electronics store lootings.

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#218

Too bad, but I managed to watch about 30 seconds of the video before getting motion sickness. Seems like a really cool technology, though. I wonder if anyone else got the same response, or it's just me.

Same. It's very cool but left me badly motion sick.

Re: Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

#220
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaussian splatting is a way to record 3-dimensional video. You capture a scene from many angles simultaneously and then combine all of those into a single representation. Ideally, that representation is good enough that you can then, post-production, simulate camera angles you didn't originally record. For example, the camera orbits around the performers in this music video are difficult to imagine in real space. Eve…

Thanks for the explanation! It makes a lot of sense that voxels would scale as badly as they do, especially if you want to increase resolution. Am I right in assuming that the reason this scales a lot better is because the Gaussian splats, once there's enough "resolution" of them, can provide the estimates for how light works reasonably well at most distances? What I'm getting at is, if I can see Gaussian splats vs v…

I think, yes, with greater splat density—and, critically, more and better inputs to train on, others have stated that these performances were captured with 56 RealSense D455fs—then splats will more accurately estimate light at more angles and distances. I think it's likely that during capture they had to make some choices about lighting and bake those in, so you might still run into issues matching lighting to your shots, but still.

https://www.realsenseai.com/products/real-sense-depth-camera...

That said, I don't think splats:voxels as pixels:vector graphics. Maybe a closer analogy would be pixels:vectors is the same as voxels:3d mesh modeling. You might imagine a sophisticated animated character being created and then animated using motion capture techniques.

But notice where these things fall apart, too. SVG shines when it's not just estimating the true form, but literally is it (fonts, simplified graphics made from simple strokes). If you try to estimate a photo using SVG it tends to get messy. Similar problems arise when reconstructing a 3d mesh from real-world data.

I agree that splats are a bit like pixels, though. They're samples of color and light in 3d (2d) space. They represent the source more faithfully when they're more densely sampled.

The difference is that a splat is sampled irregularly, just where it's needed within the scene. That makes it more efficient at representing most useful 3d scenes (i.e., ones where there are a few subjects and objects in mostly empty space). It just uses data where that data has an impact.

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