At the beginning of this year, I started chatting with David Rhodes, who had been developing a Houdini plugin for Gaussian Splatting called GSOPS. Over the course of the year, Rhodes made significant progress on GSOPS, securing third place in SideFX's H20 SIDEFX LABS Tech Art Challenge.
Shortly after CVPR, I connected with Ruben Diaz, who had just posted on LinkedIn about a viewport renderer for the Radiance Field method, Gaussian Splatting, integrated into Houdini. Unbeknownst to each other, Rhodes and Diaz had been independently building toward the same goal: harnessing Houdini's power to be used explicitly (no pun intended) with Gaussian Splatting.
About a month ago, this collaboration was teased in a post by Diaz, with more details promised. Today, those details are here with the announcement of GSOPS 2.0, which integrates Ruben’s viewport rendering. The big news is the introduction of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing for 3DGS captures. This means that any changes or edits made in Houdini’s interface are immediately reflected in the output, exactly as they will appear when rendered or finalized.
Some key features of this update include splat transformation tools, such as rotating spherical harmonics, dynamic 4DGS using per-frame .ply sequences, and coarse meshing capabilities.
Additionally, users will be excited to hear that splat mixer tools are in development, allowing scenes to be blended using various techniques. The release also includes a scale reference tool and, perhaps most excitingly, measurement capabilities assuming there is a ground truth reference.
Another major update: GSOPS 2.0 will be upgraded to the Houdini Indie license, meaning it can be used commercially as long as you have a suitable Houdini license.
The captures featured in the announcement video were provided by Neirin Jones of Prism AI, who recently demonstrated high-quality Radiance Fields for virtual production at IBC 2024. This has been the latest in advancements across industry standard applications that support Radiance Fields. I am aware of other platforms where Radiance Field support will be coming imminently.
Later this month, both David Rhodes and Ruben Diaz will be coming onto the View Dependent Podcast. More information on that soon!
You can find GSOPS 1.0 until the release of 2.0. The code for both GSOPS and Ruben’s Viewport Renderer is available on GitHub for those interested in checking it out or contributing.
