3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

Goal: Implement a minimal 3DGS pipeline

Stack: OpenGL, C++

Concepts: Structure from motion, Gaussian splatting, differentiable loss

Build

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --target convert_colmap viewer

convert_colmap reads COLMAP text output and writes an initial ASCII PLY:

./build/convert_colmap data/colmap/sparse data/colmap/gaussians_init.ply

viewer renders an ASCII PLY as RGB GL_POINTS. Pass the COLMAP sparse directory as the second argument to draw camera frustums:

./build/viewer data/colmap/gaussians_init.ply data/colmap/sparse

Use --check to validate PLY and sparse-pose loading without opening a window:

./build/viewer --check data/colmap/gaussians_init.ply data/colmap/sparse