aras_p

(blog post author here)

No, just a blog post, a code repository and an interactive blur testing page. It could be a paper, but I'm too busy with other things to actually do a paper.

That is not actually true.

Unity used to be on ancient version of Mono before year 2017. Then until 2019 the option to use “up to date” version was optional. Since 2019 it has been on more or less current Mono version (Mono itself stopped getting any serious updates around 2020).

If you mean built-in Unity physics, then unlikely. All built-in physics stuff (either 3D physics which is PhysX, or 2D physics which is Box2D) are done entirely in C++ code and are unaffected by Mono float<->double shenanigans.

(author here) I think yes and no -- while it is true that the "MOP" quick test I tried does not allow to access/decompress individual EXR channels, it does allow to access "chunks" of the image. Unlike say EXR ZIP that splits up image into 16 scanline chunks where each is independent, this splits up into 16K pixel chunks where each is completely independent from each other. So you can access a chunk without decompressing the whole image.

That said, if someone were to investigate ideas like this furher, then yes, making "layers" within EXR be able to get decompressed independently would be a thing to look at. Making individual "channels" perhaps not so much; it is very likely that if someone needs say "indirect specular" layer, then they need all the channels inside of it (R, G, B).

Yes, within VSE (and elsewhere in Blender) almost (*) everything uses premultiplied alpha, directly or indirectly. 8bit/channel images are stored non-premultiplied, but any math done on them does premultiplication, the math, then reverses back into un-premultiplied form (reason being, that w/ premultiplication 8bit/channel is not enough precision). Float/channel images are always premultiplied.

(*) I have found one or two VSE effects that do not do the correct premultiplication within their calculations. Someone(tm) should fix them at some point. But also a good question, whether there should be an option to keep previous "broken" behavior.

wrt color spaces, VSE by default does not do blending in linear color space. Default is sRGB, and variuous blending operations are done directly on sRGB values, i.e. "what four decades of photoshop has taught us to accept as expected results". VSE can be set to operate in some other color space, optionally.

wrt filtering of images, the pixel values are "just" filtered without color space awareness. So for 8bit/channel images (usually sRGB), they get "slightly incorrectly" filtered. If you want proper linear space filtering, can force images to be to floating point (any floating point images wihtin Blender are in "scene linear").

My guess is that the code was written by someone in 1995 back when no one understood color spaces, or something (it's hard to track down who and when wrote it exactly due to all file moves and refactors etc.)

No it's not. But, the previous code was already effectively doing "c * c" for the last 15 years. So for now, just keep doing that, a bit faster.

A more proper way would be to do proper color-space aware luma calculation. Which under default settings is sRGB indeed, but not necessarily so (VSE can be set to operate in some other color space). Someday!

(blog post author here)

Most of actual research I've seen (i.e. papers) are not Unity/Unreal, they rather are CUDA/Python.

The "Unity Gaussian Splatting" is not a research per se, just integration of that existing technique into Unity. As for why Unity, well yeah that's because I have experience with it, and am comfortable using it.

There's many other people experimenting with in in web ecosystem (WebGL, WebGPU, three.js, aframe etc.), that you can say is properly open source.

Blender as is right now is lacking certain functionalities to efficiently do gaussian splatting. However, for upcoming Blender 4.1 several pieces are landing - I have extended PLY file importer to be able to import custom attributes (as needed by gaussian splats), someone else contributed APIs to be able to write compute shaders from a Python addon. Once various pieces like that are in place, someone could indeed make a decently performant gaussian splat add-on or something.

I can't comment on the linked github issues, but looking at the turbopfor icapp.c sources, it looks like the blosc2 bytedelta is not used correctly there: the expected order is "shuffle, then bytedelta", but icapp.c does "bytedelta, then shuffle". That might explain the poor result you get :)

Yeah I was considering whether to include TurboPFor at some point or not. It looks really good, but for my particular use case is not applicable due to GPL license.

"Kind of". My understanding is that block floating point actually makes a bunch of numbers have the same exponent (probably the largest among the group). That's not exactly the same as reordering bytes where exponents can be different (but maybe similar).

So "block" is not a lossless transformation/compression.

(post author) All of this has been done elsewhere! I'm just trying to try various approaches that are out there, on "my own data".