Gaussian Splatting in Blender (fast + free)

Gausian splatting is easier to do than ever before. I've been playing around with it for the last couple of months, and it's a brilliant way to create 3D models using home videos, found footage, and collections of photographs. Gausian splats are impressionistic three-dimensional point clouds, which capture the optics of the camera, the atmosphere of the space, and the materiality of its surfaces. They capture soft, fuzzy, organic forms and glassy, shiny, and translucent objects. We can now do this process using all free software and we can compute our models faster than ever using glow map. We can render our splats in Blender and we can composite 3D objects into them which also happens to help with the process of motion tracking. So I'm going to take you through how I created this Gausian splat here and show you how you can do it at home for free. Okay. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to convert this video into still frames so we can process it as a photoggramometry model. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up Blender 4.5 and I'm going to go over to the video editing workspace. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag my footage into the video timeline and I'm going to snap it to the playhead here. Now if I zoom out a little bit and then press Ctrl T. You can see how many frames are in this footage. And if I wanted to constrain the scene duration to this strip, I can go to view range and set frame range to strips. And because my footage is only about 175 frames long, this should be perfectly fine. But your footage might be longer. In fact, it might be quite a bit longer. And so if you're in the region of 400, 500 frames or perhaps even more than that, you might want to consider reducing it to make the photoggramometry processing a little bit quicker. So if your clip is quite long, what you can do is you can go over here to the output properties and you can set the frame range end to something like 250. Then what you can do is you can click on your strip, press Ctrl+R, and you should see these two little key frame indicators pop up. This controls the rate of the clip. If you select the one on the right hand side, and then drag it to the scene end, you can see that your clip has now been constrained to 250 frames. In my case, however, I only have 175 frames to worry about. So, I'm not going to do that. So, with my duration set for my clip, I can go back here over to the output properties,