Gaussian Splatting has been something I wanted to explore for a long time and now time has finally come. Inspired by the various talks of XK Studio and Entagma I wanted to transform Gaussian Splats and try creating something myself

I tested both GSOPs in Houdini 20.5 as well as the bakeGSplat node in 21.0 which works like a dream. Once the gaussian splats were converted into points and cleaned, I could remesh it, test different simulations on it and treat it like any other mesh. To transform the original splats with the placeholder geometry, I used the pointdeform.

I then continued to relight and render them using Karma XPU and a little VEX magic, using a similar method as presented by Oliver Markowski.