Printing Gaussian Splats

A while ago Teng Xu from crysta.ai contacted me and offered to print one of my insects as a present. Ever since I'm fascinated by the process, the possibilities and was really excited to finally get my hands on the print!

We had a little bit of back and forth to negotiate the best possible quality. As you can't print view dependent color, I decided to directly train it with spherical harmonics at level 0. Instead of later averaging it. I also trained it in linear space, to hopefully get more physical plausible transparency values, in hindsight, I'm not sure if that was a good idea, as the people from crysta had to adjust their pipeline.

The Gaussian splat is first voxelated, a bit like a Minecraft level. Each voxel has a mix of inks and can be more or less transparent. This then get's printed on special 3d printer, layer by layer.

The resulting piece of "crystal", is honestly so cool. It's a modern version of amber. You can trap stuff for eternity. I think mine turned out a tad too brown and dark (might have been due to my linear file) and some splat artefacts are still visible (to me). Actually, color wise it might be pretty spot on:

It's the fur that is still a tad too clumpy or thick. These fine fur transparency is tricky to get right.

Shining a light through the bee, looks surprisingly interesting too, almost like it's organs are showing through.

Crista AI are still in the process of building their business, so things are improving. They have recently released an alpha version of their editor, to place and scale the splat.

I would love to see some way of previewing the voxelization. I could also see import capabilities of voxel data directly, for example anything modeled in MagicaVoxel, that would open up the service to more artists. And if we're at it, I'd like to import splats into MagicaVoxel too. 🙂

Visit their X, to see more example prints.