Printing Gaussian Splats

(patreon.com)

319 points | by ilnmtlbnm 2 days ago

15 comments

  • pizzathyme 13 hours ago
    Incredible. I may be the only one in the dark, but until this moment I had no idea 3D printing at this high a fidelity was possible. It looks like a real bee.

    Last I knew, the best 3D prints still looked like hardened play dough

    • arjie 11 hours ago
      It's different kinds of printers. That's a resin printer - pretty high-end one. I'm not getting that result on my Bambu P1S.
      • stavros 10 hours ago
        But how does resin do colors?
        • jawngee 7 hours ago
          UV Inkjet.

          HeyGears is releasing a prosumer full color UV inkjet resin printer this year for < $2K: https://store.heygears.com/products/heygears-g1-direct

        • shitloadofbooks 10 hours ago
          One approach is to just print CMYK resin like an inkjet printer (and then cure it with UV).

          Do that hundreds or thousands of times and you eventually get Z height.

          Look up the EufyMake E1 for a consumer/prosumer version.

          • Gigachad 9 hours ago
            The EufiMake isn't really a 3D printer though. It's more a normal printer that can do an embossed/textured print.
    • Gigachad 12 hours ago
      I do a lot of 3D printing and I had no idea either. I did some searching and this printer is as big as a work bench and likely costs around $200,000.
    • crazygringo 10 hours ago
      Same. This is insane, I had no idea!

      There's nothing I personally want to bring, but these would make AMAZING gifts, cool things for your desk/bookcase, etc.

      There have got to be so many interesting, educational, and cultural objects you could print like this, and the fact you can "blow up" an object like a insect is even cooler.

      Depending on the price, this feels like something that could take off in a big way.

  • simonjgreen 4 hours ago
    Overview of the printer used: https://youtu.be/T6sxVtViX-k
    • lnenad 2 hours ago
      Wow, truly amazing that you can print a high fidelity Snickers bar.
  • smusamashah 7 hours ago
  • tugdual 26 minutes ago
    Absolutely incredible
  • KeplerBoy 6 hours ago
    How much are the prints approximately? Can't see a price anywhere.
    • thenthenthen 5 hours ago
      Not sure, but this will be cheap soon and invading trinket shops everywhere for sure!
      • KeplerBoy 4 hours ago
        Sure beats flexy dragons, so I'm all for it.
        • thenthenthen 4 hours ago
          You know exactly what I was hinting at haha
    • jibal 3 hours ago
      $143 according to a comment on the page.
  • terabytest 13 hours ago
    What is the 3d printing technique being used here? I can’t intuitively recognize it.
    • JonathonW 13 hours ago
      Resin, on one of these big expensive Stratasys machines: https://www.stratasys.com/en/3d-printers/printer-catalog/pol...
      • diabllicseagull 10 hours ago
        so they buy and operate the machine, the customer brings the splat. is this just a print lab?
        • promiseofbeans 7 hours ago
          Looks like it. Plus it looks like they’re closer to a traditional screen sprinting shop in that they just take a file and will work with you manually tweak and adjust things to look good, rather than just printing a file straight away
    • Lerc 12 hours ago
      I remember seeing a 3d printer that was essentially a 2d printer which printed the surface and cut the outline and then laminated the sheets together which depending on the paper used would get you a block of something between mdf and plywood with high surface detail imagery.

      I would imagine much the same approach could be done by laminating clear plastic sheets if you can maintain the transparencey without bubbles. It would get you modern colour printer resolution in two dimensions and sheet thickness in the other.

      It wouldn't surprise me if some smart cookie could make a resin printer with a resin that sets in a state reflecting different wavelengths depending on how you zap it. That's a problem left for the reader.

      You could easily release pigment into resin just before it gets hardened, but getting the right pigment to the right place would be hard, A print head zapping back and forth inside the liquid doesn't sound like it would be viable.

      Printing in resin bottom to top part could allow a colour print head to fly over the surface printing a pigment layer then squirting the next layer of resin on top, zap and repeat.

  • GL26 4 hours ago
    Interesting how they voxelate the splat to print it. I am sure there are more efficient algorithms that allow you to make a mesh which then gets sliced before printing
  • a_c 2 hours ago
    I can already see myself hoarding all the prints
  • noduerme 3 hours ago
    This is genuinely fucking cool. I don't think I've ever seen a 3d printing implementation like this before. I'm not a big fan of splats as a modeling method, but for something like this it's fantastic.
  • relaxing 13 hours ago
    Very cool product! And to think, in one of the many prior gaussian splatting threads someone declared there was no way anyone could build a business around the technique.
    • spencerflem 13 hours ago
      To be fair, if they first vocalize it they could just use Sparse Voxels which is my favorite differentiable rendering technique https://github.com/NVlabs/svraster
      • amluto 9 hours ago
        I find the workflow of fitting Gaussian splats and then immediately turning them into voxels to be rather surprising, too. I can imagine some performance benefits at large scale, or maybe a reduced tendency to generate certain types of artifacts, but going straight to voxels seems more straightforward.
  • loclol101 6 hours ago
    Definitely ready to try this. Some scifi stuff
  • pants2 11 hours ago
    This is insanely cool. My wallet is ready.
  • vicentwu 7 hours ago
    I want buy one.
  • warumdarum 9 hours ago
    Fantastic work!