Transcription
All right. Hey everybody and welcome back. So today we're going to be taking a look at something a little bit different, and this is going to be a review of the different Gaussian splatting tools and pipelines that are out there currently. There's been a ton of progress and advancement in this space. A lot of the tools have changed. Uh, there's some new ones, and so I thought it would be great to go through everything and really dive in and figure out what is the best offering across a number of different criteria, including quality, ease of use, uh, price, of course, and also, um, general like workflow integration and everything like that.
So, we have uh quite a few different uh types of pipelines and services to go through today. I'm going to go through each of these and talk a little bit about them, and then go through kind of my comparison across all of these. First thing I'm going to say at the very, very front is that I am not getting paid by any of these companies to say or not to say anything. This is all my own. Uh, I did this research for myself in my studio, and now I'm sharing it with everybody because I think it's really helpful, but nobody's compensating me for it, and definitely none of these companies are. Uh, so with that said, let's first jump into just going over each of the different options presented to have a better understanding before the comparison.
Okay, so uh first is Postshot. Postshot is probably familiar to most people watching this video. Uh, it's been the industry standard for a minute, and it's great. Uh, I have it open also right now. Uh, so I can show you a little bit. You know, it has this viewer. You can see your different cameras. You have a bunch of different options for training the splats. Um, and it's great. The the fidelity here is pretty high, very good quality, and also there's an Unreal Engine plugin, which is great and makes integrating with UEIE super, super easy. Uh, what are some of the drawbacks? Postshot. Well, it recently moved from a free beta to a paid release. And as you can see, especially if you're on monthly, it's kind of expensive. And so it is good to know about, and it's really great actually, but it might cost a little bit. And I was using it myself during the free beta, but then I realized that I need to explore a little bit because this is a lot of money. One thing I will note is that the paid format does allow you to use um the UE node and export in POI. However, to use the super high resolution stuff, you need to have the studio license, which is again, like, pretty expensive.
So, what are some other options we have? Well, we have Lickfeld Studio, which is an open-source version of Postshot. And I have this up as well. You can see this interface looks kind of similar. The splat also looks kind of decent. Uh, we have the ability to set some of these different training parameters uh and do different like optimization things. I'm not going to go through all the functionality here. There are plenty of good tutorials for that. Uh, but this is this is Lickfeld Studio. And what are the benefits and drawbacks of Lickfeld Studio? Well, pro, it's open source and it's free. That's great. Uh, con is that it requires a little bit more of a pipeline. Uh, in Postshot, you can really just like drag a video in, it will auto-extract the frames for you. Um, so if I go back to Postshot and let's say uh a new one, I can drop a a video in here, and this is just a straight video. And then it will let me, you know, select the images, image count, my model, my uh image pixel size, splat count, whatever. All these options are great. Uh, and when we import this, it all imports just like immediately uh right from the video, which is an ideal workflow for me. Uh, however, the Lickfeld Studio requires a little bit more. If I go file, uh, let's see, I have to import a data set. And what that means is that I have to do a Colmap pass on an well, first, if I have an image or a video rather, I have to extract the frames, then do Colmap, uh, and then pass the Colmap data set into Lickfeld Studio. You can use Reality Scan to do that and make it a little bit easier, but it is still definitely a manual process, and that's a drawback. However, it's kind of the price you have to pay for a free and open-source software.
Now, quality-wise, unfortunately, Lickfeld Studio has a little bit uh lacking. This scan actually turned out pretty good. Uh, however, a couple of the recreations uh Lickfeld Studio actually failed in completely, and some of them there's like a lot of floaters, more than Postshot for sure. Now, there's some post-processing you can do to clean this up a little bit, but this evaluation is kind of like what's going to give you the best results out of the box. And so, Lickfeld Studio is a great option, and it is free, and it is open source. However, uh, there are going to be some issues with it. For example, I believe here. Okay. Well, then I'll just import a whole new data set. Now, why not? For example, this is a Colmap data set from the Pacific wax myrtle. As you can see, I've got all my points and everything in here already. However, uh, Lickfeld Studio is actually going to completely fail to reconstruct this scene. And I tried several times, and it failed each time, which is sad because other uh other of the services do reconstruct it. Um, so these are kind of the two like local varieties that I've uh reviewed for this.
Now, let's move on to the apps. First is Luma. Luma is sick. Uh, I love Luma. It's probably the best of the apps. I'll just give you that spoiler right now. Um, let's take a look at the SPL or the stump on Luma. Here we can see great like pretty good quality. Definitely better overall scene continuity than uh LFS for sure, and also better scene continuity, almost even than Postshot, at least in the reduction of floaters and things. Luma's got a very good algorithm for that. Uh, the pipeline is also super easy. You just create, upload, boom. Uh, it really couldn't be easier, and it's free, and you get a commercial license to use all of this stuff. The only real drawback here is that they cap you at 150 splats. And also um if you like do the recording through their app, then you don't get the source video. So make sure to do a recording with the video camera.
What else do we got? We got Teleport. Teleport automates your digital twin workflows. Uh, unfortunately actually, uh, yeah, well, so basically Teleport uh failed to reconstruct the stump. I don't really understand why, uh, and it's a little bit sad. It was able to reconstruct the wax myrtle scene that I just showed you uh with some pretty high fidelity. This wax myrtle scene is like pretty good. But the stump, it completely failed on. And unfortunately, uh, fail is a fail, and we can't be having services that are going to be failing on scans that are as easy as the stump. So, Teleport, while it does have pretty good quality for the ones that it does generate, uh, yeah, not not really worth it. Uh, I think there's one more I have on Teleport that I can show you. Let's go to captures cubic rock. And so you can see on this one, here's one of the weird issues with Teleport. Also, you see they're kind of moving like different layers of the scene almost. I don't know. It's quite strange, but the rock itself came out fine. Um, I don't know. I'm not like super impressed. So, that's Teleport. Uh, what else about Teleport? Well, pricing. Uh, you get five captures for free. I don't think that you can export them for free, which is sad. Uh, you do have pay-per-capture, which I guess is a little bit nicer than a monthly plan depending on your usage, but I don't know, it wasn't it wasn't perfect for me.
And then we have Kiri Engine. Kiri Engine is probably my preferred app outside of Luma. Uh, we can see the reconstructions themselves are all pretty good. This is pretty high fidelity. Uh, especially when we compare it to where are we? Postshot. which is here we go. Uh, okay. Well, I closed down the Postshot file for the stumps, so we're not going to compare that right now. But I do have a link for the hosted stump splats from all of these. Uh, so I'll include that. But as you can see, yeah, the Kiri recreation of the stump is like very good actually. And there's a lot of visual continuity in the whole scene. So that's like pretty strong, I would say. Uh, on the cubic, this is pretty good, too. Um, and we can see it's much more continuous of a scene versus the Teleport. >> [clears throat] >> Um, where's the Teleport that I was looking for? Uh, see like this one, if I zoom way out, like it's it's very not continuous at all. Um, there's kind of like this floating piece and then all this background. But the Kiri is much better. And uh, what was the last one? The wax myrtle. It also did pretty well. So I am a fan of Kiri. It does cost um, and you need the Pro plan to be able to uh do 3D Gaussian splatting, especially with the upload, but it's only $18 a month. And if you're going to pay for one, I'd suggest paying for this as far as the apps go. Um, I think Luma is probably still a win overall because of the differences or sorry, because it's free, and I think the visual quality is comparable, if not maybe a little better on Luma. So I would say uh I like Luma and Kiri. Teleport is decent on the reconstruction but kind of expensive.
And then we have Polycam and Scannverse, which honestly I'm not even going to talk about because neither of them allow you to upload videos and then create images from them. Uh, Polycam I was unable to or actually, sorry, Polycam you can upload, but uh, where here we go. Polycam you can upload, and the recreations are okay. Right? Like you'll notice if we compare it. Um, here we go. The color is a bit worse, and the lighting is a bit worse on this one versus the Kiri. Right? This is like a much more saturated color. Fidelity is not bad, or as far as like scene continuity, there's some weird stuff going on there. Uh, but the hard part about Polycam is that it failed. It failed me on the stump and the wax myrtle. Uh, which to me is just like, okay, sounds good. Uh, if you can't do that, it's not worth my time. And Scannverse is not usable to me because it doesn't allow you to upload a photo, and that is uh just makes it not even really usable for me. Also, in my experience, when I have done live scanning with my phone using Scannverse, the quality is mid at best. So, that's my take on Polycam and Scannverse. Uh, don't use them, don't pay for them. I would just avoid them.
And then last but not least, Reality Scan. Reality Scan ships with Epic, the Epic launcher with Unreal Engine, so you can use it for free if your projects under the commercial threshold for Unreal, which is great. It doesn't do 3D Gaussian splats, but it does do the Colmap step for you if you want to use it for Colmap. And it also can let you recreate uh 3D geometry, which can be pretty good. So, that's the overview of all of these different um [clears throat] that's the overview of all these different services. I've put together this quite exhaustive table comparing all of them, which I will publicize for future use. Um, disclaimer, like I said, I'm not affiliated here. Uh, now it's time for the overall summary, which is Postshot's still the best. If you're going to use Postshot, um, it's worth paying for. And if you need really high-quality scans and also need a lot of features and want to do everything locally and prefer a nice streamlined process for uh using video scans, I think it might be worth paying for. Uh, it is really the best in everything, and it has the Unreal integration, which is great. It also has the most features uh for maximizing quality, but it is another subscription, so there's that.
I think for a free option, Luma is still my preferred uh my prefer preference, rather. Uh, it is free, which is great, but it might not always be free. Okay. Uh, that is that is important to understand, but right now it's free. It's fast. It's good. It's got the best quality. So I choose Luma for an app. Kiri is my next best. Uh, Teleport takes a really long time and I don't think is that great. And then the other apps, as I mentioned, are not worth it. And then finally, if you're looking for something open source and free and with a GUI and local, then we're talking about Colmap and Lickfeld Studio, or Reality Scan and Lickfeld Studio, which is a decent pipeline. However, it was unable to recreate a couple scans for me that Polycam or sorry, that Postshot and Luma were easily able to handle. Uh, one of those was that wax myrtle. Um, so for this, it's unfortunately going to be difficult to fully transfer over to Lickfeld Studio because it needs to be able to recreate all the scans that I I want to recreate and that the other services are able to. So there we go. Best overall: Postshot. Best app: Luma, as long as it remains free. Best open source, totally free, totally local, is the Reality or Colmap plus Lickfeld Studio pipeline, or if you don't care as much about open source but want it to be free for at least uh smaller projects, then Reality Scan plus um Lickfeld Studio.
A couple notes here. You can get the video files, so you can try all of this yourself with just like the raw files, the raw scans. I've included a little bit of notes on the methodology. These are all wild scans, so they're not perfect. And each of them have, like I said earlier, some benefits and drawbacks. It's why I used all three of them because I wanted to see how each of these services would perform across a range of different input materials: windy, not windy, stable, unstable. And the last thing is that to compare Lickfeld and Postshot, I did make sure to have uh all those parameters like the number of splats, train steps, and image size the same across them for as close as apples to apples comparison as possible.
So here we have the comparison table with my ranking. Postshot and Luma are one. Everything else relevant: Teleport, Lickfeld, and Kiri are two, and then Scannverse and Polycam are three and four respectively. I'll leave you to go through this on your own, but I have some notes here as well as links to output scans everywhere that I could. Uh, this stump scan, I'm going to uh for example, like here on SuperSplat, show you hosted versions of the Lickfeld and Postshot scans that I trained using this data set so you can see without going through the training uh and compare. But unfortunately, I couldn't do that for all of the data sets due to hosting limitations on SuperSplat. Uh, so I've included hosted links uh where I can to the captures and um everything else you can recreate on your own using the source files. I've also included links here. And I think that's going to be everything.
So my takeaway again, at the very end of the day, is that Postshot really remains the best. And I'll close with just another Postshot comparison. Here we have the cubic scene. As you can see, the color and fidelity and continuity is really just so much better compared to the other solutions. And this is only this is with like all the basic parameters, you know, nothing too crazy going on here. So yeah, just to underscore the takeaway that Postshot remains amazing if you can justify the cost. If you can't, I recommend Luma for sure as the follow-up free app that will also produce some really high-quality results with a commercial license. And if you need to stick with free and open-source, then Lickfeld Studio and Colmap together is going to be for you. I hope this quick comparison was helpful. Again, I'll put the link to this Notion comparison and all of the other um links in there in the YouTube description so that you all have this. Thank you for following along. Uh, make sure to like and subscribe this uh video. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Follow me on Patreon if you want to get more content and tools for Gaussian splats and interactive art installations. And yeah, thank you for the time. Until next time, happy creating, and hopefully I'll see you out there.