Comment by blincoln
Feels like there must be some way to use "variability of colour by viewing angle" for tiny clusters of volumes in the object as a way to generate material settings when converting the Gaussian splat model to a traditional 3D model.
E.g. if you have a cluster of tiny adjacent volumes that have high variability based on viewing angle, but the difference between each of those volumes is small, handle it as a smooth, reflective surface, like chrome.
You can’t easily convert a gaussian splat to a polygon based model, the representation through blurry splats is the breakthrough.