Turning Gaussian Splats Into Physical Objects With a PolyJet 3D Printer

Artist Dany Bittel documents a collaboration with crysta.ai that takes a Gaussian splat — a point-cloud-style 3D capture, in this case of an insect — and fabricates it as a solid physical object. The pipeline starts by training the splat with spherical harmonics held at level 0 in linear color space, a choice meant to produce more physically plausible transparency. The splat is then voxelized into a Minecraft-like grid where each cell holds an ink mixture at a given opacity, and a PolyJet printer builds the result layer by layer. Bittel likens the outcome to a modern take on amber, an insect suspended in translucent material.

The write-up is candid about the rough edges. The print came out darker and browner than expected, possibly a side effect of the linear color-space decision, and fine fur reproduced poorly, looking clumpy rather than wispy. View-dependent color — the way a splat shifts appearance with viewing angle — simply can’t survive the transition to a static physical object, so the training approach had to be adapted, and some splat artifacts remain visible. One happy accident: backlighting the piece makes its interior structure glow in a way that reads like visible organs.

Bittel closes with feature requests for the service, including voxelization previews before printing, direct voxel imports from MagicaVoxel, and round-trip conversion between splats and voxels. The post is less a tutorial than an honest field report on an emerging niche where neural 3D capture meets multi-material additive manufacturing.