HN

Comments (122)

• Foreignborn
  I want to give a callout to Nial Ashley (aka Llainwire) for doing this in 2023 as a solo act and doing the visuals himself as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ZXg5wVoUUA shame that kid was slept on. Allegedly (according to discord) he abandoned this because so many artists reached out to have him do this style of mv, instead of wanting to collaborate on music.
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  darhodester
  Hi,I'm David Rhodes, Co-founder of CG Nomads, developer of GSOPs (Gaussian Splatting Operators) for SideFX Houdini. GSOPs was used in combination with OTOY OctaneRender to produce this music video.If you're interested in the technology and its capabilities, learn more at https://www.cgnomads.com/ or AMA.Try GSOPs yourself: https://github.com/cgnomads/GSOPs (example content included).
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  nodra
  Never did I think I would ever see anything close to related to A$AP on HN. I love this place.
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  pleurotus
  Super cool to read but can someone eli5 what Gaussian splatting is (and/or radiance fields?) specifically to how the article talks about it finally being "mature enough"? What's changed that this is now possible?
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  noman-land
  Really amazing video. Unfortunately this article is like 60% over my head. Regardless, I actually love reading jargon-filled statements like this that are totally normal to the initiated but are completely inscrutable to outsiders. "That data was then brought into Houdini, where the post production team used CG Nomads GSOPs for manipulation and sequencing, and OTOY’s OctaneRender for final rendering. Thanks to this combination, the production team was also able to relight the splats."
• millitzer
  You could also pull a Michel Gondry and do it with practical effects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0&list=RDs5FyfQDO5...
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  squidsoup
  Tangential, but I've been exploring gaussian splatting as a photographic/artistic medium for a while, and love the expressionistic quality of the model output when deprived of data.https://bayardrandel.com/gaussographs/
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  rjh29
  To be honest it looks like it was rendered in an old version of Unreal Engine. That may be an intentional choice - I wonder how realistic guassian splatting can look? Can you redo lights, shadows, remove or move parts of the scene, while preserving the original fidelity and realism?The way TV/movie production is going (record 100s of hours of footage from multiple angles and edit it all in post) I wonder if this is the end state. Gaussian splatting for the humans and green screens for the rest?
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  roughly
  Be sure to watch the video itself* - it’s really a great piece of work. The energy is frenetic and it’s got this beautiful balance of surrealism from the effects and groundedness from the human performances.* (Mute it if you don’t like the music, just like the rest of us will if you complain about the music)
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  daveofiveo
  Direct link to the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1-46Nu3HxQ
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  diffuse_l
  Too bad, but I managed to watch about 30 seconds of the video before getting motion sickness.Seems like a really cool technology, though.I wonder if anyone else got the same response, or it's just me.
• anon
  undefined
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  jtolmar
  Dang, it's been cool watching gaussian splats go from tech demo to real workflow.
• periodjet
  The end result is really interesting. As others have pointed out, it looks sort of like it was rendered by an early 2000s game engine. There’s a cohesiveness to the art direction that you just can’t get from green screens and the like. In service of some of the worst music made by human brains, but still really cool tech.
• renewiltord
  Wow, back to music videos. It’s been years. This is a great one.
• Footprint0521
  They really said it’s capturing everything when A$AP Rocky’s Gaussian splatted mouth in that video be looking worse than AI generated video lol
• badcryptobitch
  Both of my worlds are colliding with this article. I love reading about how deeply technical products/artifacts get used in art.
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  narrator
  This reminds me about how Soulja Boy just used a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and a cheap microphone and recorded all his songs that made him millions.[1] Edit: Ok this was a big team of VFX producers who did this. Still, prices are coming down dramatically in general, but yeah that idea is a bit of an underfit to this case.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rjhVe59ek
• drdirk
  Can somebody explain to me what was actually scanned? Only the actors doing movements like push ups, or whole scenes / rooms?
• lawgimenez
  A$AP Rocky’s music videos has been always great.
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  moribvndvs
  In another setting, it looks like ass, but lo-fi, glitchy shit is perfectly compatible with hip-hop aesthetic. Good track though.
• sneak
  > One recurring reaction to the video has been confusion. Viewers assume the imagery is AI-generated. According to Evercoast, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every stunt, every swing, every fall was physically performed and captured in real space. What makes it feel synthetic is the freedom volumetric capture affords.No, it’s simply the framerate.
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  MuffinFlavored
  How did Rhianna look him in the eyes and say "yes babe, good album, release it, this is what the people wanted after 7 years, it is pleasing to listen to and enjoyable"?
• weinzierl
  "The team also used Blender heavily for layout and previs, converting splat sequences into lightweight proxy caches for scene planning."
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  yieldcrv
  so basically despite the higher resource requirements like 10TB of data for 30 minutes of footage, the compositing is so much faster and more flexible and those resources can be deleted or moved to long term storage in the cloud very quickly and the project can move onfascinatingI wouldn't have normally read this and watched the video, but my Claude sessions were already executing a planthe tl;dr is that all the actors were scanned in a 3D point cloud system and then "NeRF"'d which means to extrapolate any missing data about their transposed 3D modelthis was then more easily placed into the video than trying to compose and place 2D actors layer by layer
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  KevinMS
  aren't music videos supposed to have music?
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  londons_explore
  Pretty sure most of this could be filmed with a camera drone and preprogrammed flight path...Did the Gaussian splatting actually make it any cheaper? Especially considering that it needed 50+ fixed camera angles to splat properly, and extensive post-processing work both computationally and human labour, a camera drone just seems easier.