Gaussian Splatting: The next big thing in 3D [video]

Specular higlights are view dependent and the specular higlights seem to react properly when tumbling the virtual camera. It seems reasonable that it would be possible to do a reverse calculation to determine the location and intensity of light sources in a scanned scene. Once those are determined, they can be extracted from the scene and made global light objects in a scene in a DCC app or game engine. More than likely it would just be baked as one big IBL dome light.

I could be wrong about all of that though.

These methods learn directly the radiance, in a way which is not lighting dependent. Therefore they would render the same and shadows are not taken into account. Current methods aren’t able to do this, but maybe some day we might discover methods which could infer and take into account some lighting parameters.

It’s entirely static for now. I’m sure we’ll see techniques for dynamics objects eventually though.