As the requisite technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, energy around the 3D modeling and rendering space has followed right along. It makes sense, as it’s always been more natural for humans to understand assets and the world around them in three dimensions. It’s just that the ability to create those renderings, particularly in spatially accurate ways, has not followed along. More recently, new techniques have come along as new innovative approaches to 3D modeling and rendering have been created, most notably with NeRFs and Gaussian Splats. As these continue to gain traction, we thought it would make sense to look back at our coverage of these techniques, monitoring how things have progressed.
Find links to the full articles below.
Neural networks can make photogrammetry almost instantaneous
This article is from back in March of 2022, and this is really when NeRFs started to gain steam. NeRFs, or Neural Radiance Fields, allow for the creation of a 3D model using far fewer images than traditional photogrammetry thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. In this article, our Carla Lauter looks at NVIDIA’s “Instant NeRF” model and how revolutionary it was at the time, and remains today.
Gaussian Splatting is new, but quickly gaining favor
More recently, Gaussian Splats have taken hold of the industry’s imagination, allowing for similarly simple 3D model creation but with less compute power necessary for creation and sharing. There are still plenty of shortcomings for this technique as it’s less than a year old at this point, but the potential is immense. This article looks at how Gaussian Splats work, and why they’re so powerful.
Experiencing the Innovation: NeRFs and Gaussian Splats Showcased at Geo Week 2024
When new techniques like this come out, it’s one thing to read research papers and summaries of said papers to gain more information, but little is more valuable than hearing from actual end users and practitioners. At Geo Week 2024, attendees were able to get exactly that with a session featuring Jonathan Stephens, Ben Stocker, and Jason Laan. This article gives a high-level recap of those presentations.
NeRFs and Gaussian Splatting: The Future of 3D
More recently, we hosted a webinar at Geo Week News with more presentations from end users and practitioners with both of these techniques. Stephens returned for this, and was joined by Yoshi Sato and Ted Parisot. The three gave presentations outlining the basics of NeRFs and Gaussian Splats, as well as an application developed by Sato and real-world use cases from Parisot. You can register for a free, on-demand recording of the conversation with the link below.
How Alteia is leveraging NeRFs in inspection workflows
With NeRFs, and to some extent Gaussian Splats, the techniques are more theoretical than tangible. It’s absolutely possible to create 3D models from these techniques, and as outlined in the webinar linked above there are real business cases for the models. However, tangible use cases like the ones achieved from traditional photogrammetry are still rare, to say the least. However, last year we spoke with the French company, Alteia, who are using NeRFs in their inspection workflows.
