3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a process that enables the direct creation of 3D objects from 2D images. This representation offers numerous advantages, including rapid training and rendering. However, a significant limitation of 3DGS is the challenge of incorporating light and shadow reflections, primarily due to the utilization of rasterization rather than ray tracing for rendering. This paper introduces RaySplats, a model that employs ray-tracing based Gaussian Splatting. Rather than utilizing the projection of Gaussians, our method employs a ray-tracing mechanism, operating directly on Gaussian primitives represented by confidence ellipses with RGB colors. In practice, we compute the intersection between ellipses and rays to construct ray-tracing algorithms, facilitating the incorporation of meshes with Gaussian Splatting models and the addition of lights, shadows, and other related effects.
@article{arxiv.2501.19196,
title = {RaySplats: Ray Tracing based Gaussian Splatting},
author = {Krzysztof Byrski and Marcin Mazur and Jacek Tabor and Tadeusz Dziarmaga and Marcin Kądziołka and Dawid Baran and Przemysław Spurek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.19196},
year = {2025}
}