Author: Wimmer, Michael ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Editorial
    (Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2025) Alliez, Pierre; Wimmer, Michael; Westermann, Rüdiger
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Does 3D Gaussian Splatting Need Accurate Volumetric Rendering?
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2025) Celarek, Adam; Kopanas, Georgios; Drettakis, George; Wimmer, Michael; Kerbl, Bernhard; Bousseau, Adrien; Day, Angela
    Since its introduction, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become an important reference method for learning 3D representations of a captured scene, allowing real-time novel-view synthesis with high visual quality and fast training times. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), which preceded 3DGS, are based on a principled ray-marching approach for volumetric rendering. In contrast, while sharing a similar image formation model with NeRF, 3DGS uses a hybrid rendering solution that builds on the strengths of volume rendering and primitive rasterization. A crucial benefit of 3DGS is its performance, achieved through a set of approximations, in many cases with respect to volumetric rendering theory. A naturally arising question is whether replacing these approximations with more principled volumetric rendering solutions can improve the quality of 3DGS. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the various approximations and assumptions used by the original 3DGS solution. We demonstrate that, while more accurate volumetric rendering can help for low numbers of primitives, the power of efficient optimization and the large number of Gaussians allows 3DGS to outperform volumetric rendering despite its approximations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Inverse Simulation of Radiative Thermal Transport
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2025) Freude, Christian; Lipp, Lukas; Zezulka, Matthias; Rist, Florian; Wimmer, Michael; Hahn, David; Bousseau, Adrien; Day, Angela
    The early phase of urban planning and architectural design has a great impact on the thermal loads and characteristics of constructed buildings. It is, therefore, important to efficiently simulate thermal effects early on and rectify possible problems. In this paper, we present an inverse simulation of radiative heat transport and a differentiable photon-tracing approach. Our method utilizes GPU-accelerated ray tracing to speed up both the forward and adjoint simulation. Moreover, we incorporate matrix compression to further increase the efficiency of our thermal solver and support larger scenes. In addition to our differentiable photon-tracing approach, we introduce a novel approximate edge sampling scheme that re-uses primary samples instead of relying on explicit edge samples or auxiliary rays to resolve visibility discontinuities. Our inverse simulation system enables designers to not only predict the temperature distribution, but also automatically optimize the design to improve thermal comfort and avoid problematic configurations. We showcase our approach using several examples in which we optimize the placement of buildings or their facade geometry. Our approach can be used to optimize arbitrary geometric parameterizations and supports steady-state, as well as transient simulations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Splatshop: Efficiently Editing Large Gaussian Splat Models
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2025) Schütz, Markus; Peters, Christoph; Hahlbohm, Florian; Eisemann, Elmar; Magnor, Marcus; Wimmer, Michael; Knoll, Aaron; Peters, Christoph
    We present Splatshop, a highly optimized toolbox for interactive editing (selection, deletion, painting, transformation, . . . ) of 3D Gaussian Splatting models. Utilizing a comprehensive collection of heuristic approaches, we carefully balance between exact and fast rendering to enable precise editing without sacrificing real-time performance. Our experiments confirm that Splatshop achieves these goals for scenes with up to 100 million primitives. We also show how our proposed pipeline can be extended for use with head-mounted displays. As such, Splatshop is the first VR-capable editor for large-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting models and a step towards a ''Photoshop for Gaussian Splatting.''