A little known rendering technique that can create low-cost, photo-real graphics may be about to have its big moment in game development

A photo-real art style rarely sells me on a game. That said, over the last few months, a tech delivering low-cost, photorealistic graphics has become something of a singular obsession of mine: Gaussian splatting.

Previously, I lost myself in this very basic FPS laying its scene inside a Gaussian splat of a real-world abandoned space. I caught up with the browser-based demo's artist, Christoph Schindelar, for an introduction into what Gaussian Splatting is and how it works. But today, I'd like to take a deeper dive into how it's done and what it can be used for—so I pestered Christoph Schindelar for his insight once again.

Schindelar is a scan artist who has previously worked for Quixel, an Epic-owned company with a world-renowned library of 3D scanned assets. He has been Gaussian splatting (or GS) sinc...