Popular Movies Turned into 3D with Gaussian Splatting & Unreal Engine

How cool would it be to freely explore scenes from popular movies in 3D software like Unreal Engine? Very cool and pretty achievable, actually, as proven by Bad Decisions Studio once again.

Last week, we showed you how the studio turned a sequence from Quentin Tarantino's 2009 Inglourious Basterds into 3D using Gaussian Splatting and Unreal Engine 5. That was just a teaser, and now it's time to see how other famous movies can handle the same treatment.

Bad Decisions tried the technique on The Shining, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, Prince of Persia, and The Matrix, explaining how it all works and even creating new shots with the scenes.

First, the studio found some scenes where the camera orbits a static object to get some idea about the depth of the scene. They then cut the scenes out, converted them into image sequences, and proceeded to train the model. 

The images run through an algorithm that creates point clouds based on the subject. Those point clouds are converted into Gaussians, which can hold various sizes, color values, and transparency values. Then those Gaussians are optimized again and again until they're photoreal.

The results are impressive, although not all scenes came out as good as others. Complicated shapes and some extra objects might mess up the final 3D scene, but I think it's possible to clean it up. Plus the ease of use and speed of the technique still makes it a great tool for such purposes.

At the end of the video, Bad Decisions modified some of the scenes, adding different lighting, camera movement, and text to them. Overall, this experiment looks fun and opens multiple doors for game development and movie production.

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