There’s some movement in this area to be able to surface quantize the splats but you are right, right now it’s simply just visual language and isn’t useful in the pipeline.

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cyber_kinetist an hour ago | parent [-]

Extracting a surface mesh is possible, but the result is going to be really ugly (like the high-poly meshes from generative AI that are useless to artists)!

Mesh processing is a very difficult research domain in computer graphics that has been iterated for several decades, and we still don't have a good automated solution for retopology (Partly because the problem is hard to define in a mathematical way, but also since it's not a problem you can just solve with AI by throwing data and compute at it)

	▲	reactordev 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I used voxelization of the splats in the past so I appreciate the notes on the difficulty but this is sort of what PlayCanvas is doing here. Taking the splats, making voxels, meshing. It's a novel approach and worked well in BIM a few years ago, though not anything real-time. https://github.com/ziplab/VolSplat