H22 - Gaussian Splats | Peter Sanitra | Houdini 22 HIVE

Want to master the future of real-time 3D capture? Peter Sanitra from Nvidia dives into Houdini 22's groundbreaking, end-to-end automated Gaussian Splatting pipeline. He breaks down how these point-based anisotropic ellipsoids use spherical harmonics to fake hyper-realistic, view-dependent reflections, specular highlights, and complex volumetric effects like clouds and explosions at a fraction of the standard file size. Peter shows off how to train custom splats using SideFX's native Solaris recipes, animate them seamlessly using traditional rigging and point-deformation tools, and even relight them procedurally inside Copernicus using trained normal and albedo maps. 00:00 - Intro & What Are Gaussian Splats? 01:51 - Stacking Opacities, Parallax, and Fine Fur Details 03:52 - SideFX's Native Solaris Splatting Recipe 05:54 - Gathering Ground Truth Renders & Extra Feature Training 08:20 - Training Strategies: Default vs. Monte Carlo 11:09 - Tracking Loss Metrics & Splat Count Quality Comparison 16:07 - Volumetric Wins: High-HDR Explosions & Instant Clouds 21:28 - Animating Splats Natively & The New USD Schema 24:39 - Environment Capture & The Camera Placement Problem 34:39 - Q&A: Relighting Splats in Copernicus vs. Solaris #Houdini22 #H22 #H22HIVE #SideFX #GaussianSplatting #3DGS #HoudiniSolaris #Copernicus #HoudiniCOPs #VFXPipeline #3DScanning #RealTimeRendering #USD