Printing Gaussian Splats

(patreon.com)

91 points | by ilnmtlbnm 2 days ago

4 comments

  • pizzathyme 46 minutes 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

  • terabytest 41 minutes ago
    What is the 3d printing technique being used here? I can’t intuitively recognize it.
    • Lerc 18 minutes 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.

    • JonathonW 32 minutes ago
      Resin, on one of these big expensive Stratasys machines: https://www.stratasys.com/en/3d-printers/printer-catalog/pol...
  • relaxing 1 hour 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.