Comment by etskinner
How does it capture the reflection (the iridescence of the fly's body)? It's almost as if I can see the background through the reflection.
I would have thought that since that reflection has a different color in different directions, gaussian splat generation would have a hard time coming to a solution that satisfies all of the rays. Or at the very least, that a reflective surface would turn out muddy rather than properly reflective-looking.
Is there some clever trickery that's happening here, or am I misunderstanding something about gaussian splats?
The color is view-dependent, which also means the lighting is baked in and results in them not being usable directly for 3D animation/environments (though I’m sure there must be research happening on dynamic lighting).
Sometimes it will “go wrong”, you can see in some of the fly models that if you get too close, body parts start looking a bit transparent as some of the specular highlights are actually splats on the back of an internal surface. This is very evident with mirrors - they are just an inverted projection which you can walk right into.