Gaussian Frosting: Editable Complex Radiance Fields with Real-Time Rendering

TL;DR

Gaussian Frosting introduces a mesh-based radiance field representation that enables high-quality, real-time rendering and editing of complex 3D effects by combining Gaussian splatting with an adaptive frosting layer around the mesh.

Contribution

It proposes a novel mesh-based radiance field method with an adaptive Gaussian frosting layer, improving detail capture and editing capabilities over existing surface-based approaches.

Findings

Outperforms existing surface-based rendering methods.

Enables efficient real-time rendering and editing.

Effectively captures fine details like hair and grass.

Abstract

We propose Gaussian Frosting, a novel mesh-based representation for high-quality rendering and editing of complex 3D effects in real-time. Our approach builds on the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting framework, which optimizes a set of 3D Gaussians to approximate a radiance field from images. We propose first extracting a base mesh from Gaussians during optimization, then building and refining an adaptive layer of Gaussians with a variable thickness around the mesh to better capture the fine details and volumetric effects near the surface, such as hair or grass. We call this layer Gaussian Frosting, as it resembles a coating of frosting on a cake. The fuzzier the material, the thicker the frosting. We also introduce a parameterization of the Gaussians to enforce them to stay inside the frosting layer and automatically adjust their parameters when deforming, rescaling, editing or animating the mesh. Our representation allows for efficient rendering using Gaussian splatting, as well as editing and animation by modifying the base mesh. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various synthetic and real scenes, and show that it outperforms existing surface-based approaches. We will release our code and a web-based viewer as additional contributions. Our project page is the following: https://anttwo.github.io/frosting/