Including for the holograms in ‘Superman’.
You may have heard about the 4D Gaussian Splatting work done for the hologram of Superman’s parents in the James Gunn film Superman. Well, the company behind the actor scanning side of that work was Infinite-Realities. They worked directly with visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti and VFX studio Framestore to help craft the holograms, which were the first time this 4DGS approach was utilized for characters on a film.
Infinite Realities has been around for a while, and on this episode I spoke to IR’s Lee Perry-Smith and Henry Pearce about the company’s journey into the world of scanning, photogrammetry, videogrammetry and now gaussian splats. This is a really interesting journey, almost history, into some sides of scanning, and a look at the latest approaches.
This episode of the befores & afters podcast is sponsored by SideFX. Looking for great customer case studies, presentations and demos? Head to the SideFX YouTube channel. There you’ll find tons of Houdini, Solaris and Karma content. This includes recordings of recent Houdini HIVE sessions from around the world.
Jump into the chat, above. Below, IR’s demo video that showcases the tech, plus some notes from them about how it was made.
For this R&D preview featuring Henry Pearce we ran test captures using an affordable off-the-shelf temporal plugin to reduce flicker and improve stability over time.
We recorded @ 48fps from our 196x machine vision cameras and trained the 4DGS using Postshot at Ultra/Plaid quality ~20 million splat resolution.
What you’re seeing are stop-motion 3DGS frames. Each frame is an individual Gaussian Splat—processed to ~20 million splats (6GB per frame!!) for the full scene, then cropped and cleaned to ~6 million splats per frame.
Our system—and the 3DGS process—picks up small details like stray fine hairs, skin pores and woven cloth threads. Interested to see what others can do with their systems.
