REdiSplats: Ray Tracing for Editable Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian Splatting (GS) has become one of the most important neural rendering algorithms. GS represents 3D scenes using Gaussian components with trainable color and opacity. This representation achieves high-quality renderings with fast inference. Regrettably, it is challenging to integrate such a solution with varying light conditions, including shadows and light reflections, manual adjustments, and a physical engine. Recently, a few approaches have appeared that incorporate ray-tracing or mesh primitives into GS to address some of these caveats. However, no such solution can simultaneously solve all the existing limitations of the classical GS. Consequently, we introduce REdiSplats, which employs ray tracing and a mesh-based representation of flat 3D Gaussians. In practice, we model the scene using flat Gaussian distributions parameterized by the mesh. We can leverage fast ray tracing and control Gaussian modification by adjusting the mesh vertices. Moreover, REdiSplats allows modeling of light conditions, manual adjustments, and physical simulation. Furthermore, we can render our models using 3D tools such as Blender or Nvdiffrast, which opens the possibility of integrating them with all existing 3D graphics techniques dedicated to mesh representations.

RaySplats: Ray Tracing based Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a process that enables the direct creation of 3D objects from 2D images. This representation offers numerous advantages, including rapid training and rendering. However, a significant limitation of 3DGS is the challenge of incorporating light and shadow reflections, primarily due to the utilization of rasterization rather than ray tracing for rendering. This paper introduces RaySplats, a model that employs ray-tracing based Gaussian Splatting. Rather than utilizing the projection of Gaussians, our method employs a ray-tracing mechanism, operating directly on Gaussian primitives represented by confidence ellipses with RGB colors. In practice, we compute the intersection between ellipses and rays to construct ray-tracing algorithms, facilitating the incorporation of meshes with Gaussian Splatting models and the addition of lights, shadows, and other related effects.