Relightable 3D Gaussians: Realistic Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing

In this paper, we present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework to achieve photo-realistic relighting. To make the reconstructed scene relightable, we enhance vanilla 3D Gaussians by associating extra properties, including normal vectors, BRDF parameters, and incident lighting from various directions. From a collection of multi-view images, the 3D scene is optimized through 3D Gaussian Splatting while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically based differentiable rendering. To produce plausible shadow effects in real-time relighting, we introduce an innovative point-based ray tracing with the bounding volume hierarchies for efficient visibility pre-computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our improved BRDF estimation, novel view synthesis and relighting results compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a point-based pipeline enabling editing, tracing, and relighting.