[hansworst]

> they’re not art directable or dynamic

This is not true I believe. There are plenty of papers out there revolving around dynamic/animated splat-based models, some using generative models for that aspect too.

There are also some tools out there that let you touch up/rig splat models. Still not near what you can do with meshes but I think fundamentally it’s not impossible.

[dagmx]

You can touch up a splat in the same way you can apply gross edits to an image (cropping, color corrections etc), but you can’t easily change it in a way like “make this bicycle handle bar more rounded”. Ergo it’s not art directable.

With regards to dynamicism, there’s some papers yes but with heavy limitations. Rigging is doable but relighting is still hit and miss, while most complex rigs require a mesh underneath to drive a splats surface. There’s also the issue of making sure the splats are tight to the surface boundary, which is difficult without significant other input.

Other dynamics like animation operate at a very gross level, but you can’t for example do a voronoi fracture for destruction along a surface easily. And again, even at a large scale motion, you still have the issue of splat isolation and fitting to contend with.

The neural motion papers you mention are interesting, but have a significant overhead currently outside of small use cases.

Meshes are much more straightforward, and with advancements in neutral materials and micropolygons (nanite etc) it’s really difficult to make a splat scene that isn’t first represented as a mesh have the quality and performance needed. And if you’re creating splats from a captured real world scene, they need significant cleanup first.