I was going to say the same
thing. It was nice as their native save format could still be opened anywhere.
But you did need to remember to export if you didn't want the extra fields increasing the file size. I remember finding fireworks pngs on web pages many times back then.
If you play Fortnite right now (until Friday June 7th). You can speak in realtime to Darth Vader, he replies in his voice and in character, he knows who’s playing (the name of the character skin). The technology is here, and used in production of major games. It’ll be a big tide sooner than what people expect.
Even this article suffers from the same issues? Just in the first few paragraphs: what are spherical harmonics? I read the Wikipedia article but it all went way above my head. There really needs to be a maths-for-smart-but-not-math-phd-people resource.
Ahhhhh, I think I get Spherical Harmonics! I'll try to explain in simpler words, roughly, assuming I got them correctly (which I am not 100% sure about)... I don't guarantee it'll be ELI5 though, so it may or may not work for you...
Let's start from a single guitar string. If you pluck it, it makes a sound. It's because the string vibrates. In sound processing (a.k.a. "signal processing"), it is said we can express any complex vibration of a string (or, a sound wave) as a sum of increasingly compressed ("higher frequency") sin/cos waves (called "higher harmonics"), each of them multiplied by its "contribution" (some frequencies, a.k.a. harmonics, are more present, others less). (This is also called more generally a "Taylor polynomial" IIRC/IIUC, or a "Fourier transform" in the particular case of a wave.) Notably, a .MP3 file format takes this sum, and cuts it off at some point - assuming that if we keep only a bunch of the "most strong" harmonics, and cut away the remaining waves that are less "contributing", the audible difference won't be noticeable. Also, a guitar string has a very tiny amplitude of those vibrations compared to its length, so they are barely visible. If you take a friend and start waving a piece of rope between you, you can get bigger waves, making the amplitudes much more visible.
Now, a guitar string is a 1-dimensional wave. If we go to 2D, we get a membrane of a drum. When you hit a drum to make a sound, it will start vibrating. In the same way, the shape the membrane takes in those vibrations, can be expressed as a sum of "simpler" 2D vibrations - presumably mathy/physicsy people call them "circular harmonics" or something. Again, on a drum the vibrations aren't really visible to naked eye, but if you instead took a floppy rubber circle loosely stretched on a metal ring, and start shaking it, probably you'd get bigger waves. Interestingly, IIUC, a JPEG image is basically "MP3 but in 2D case".
Now, back to Gaussian Splats and Spherical Harmonics - I assume that "spherical harmonics" are the same thing but done to a balloon. If you pump up a ("perfectly spherical") balloon, and then hit it, presumably the vibrations of its surface can also be expressed as a sum of increasingly more wrinkled ("higher harmonics") sphere-like shapes, each one multiplied by its factor/contribution/strength/presence in the actual vibration. Again, on a balloon the deformations from ideal shape are super small; but if you imagine some really floppy balloon-like sphere floating in the air, you could imagine the wrinkles being much deeper.
I assume in case of gaussian splats, apart from storing factors of each of the spherical harmonics contributing to the final "distorted blobby balloon shape", you also probably store a color of this contribution. This way, from some angles the dominating color of the blobby balloon would look more green, from others more yellow, etc.
Interestingly and coincidentally, a similar thing happens in an atom. The various "contributions" to the "blobby balloon" shape are called "electron energy levels" (or "orbitals") IIRC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital). And the actual "blobby balloon" shape is probably called an "electron cloud" IIRC. I'm super grateful you pointed me in the direction of trying to understand Spherical Harmonics, because when I saw those shapes of atomic orbitals in the past, they always seemed weird to me, and confusing. Now it seems I understand where they came from, that's super exciting!
Eheh, found one more video - building up the shape of the surface of the Earth from a sum/superimposition of increasing number of Spherical Harmonics - https://youtu.be/dDQTHFeJf5M - again roughly what an MP3 or JPEG algorithm does, depending on how much "fidelity" you choose, i.e. how many more precise harmonics you keep :)
Ah, and also - IIUC, in some other domains of math, those "harmonics" can also be said to be "eigenvalues" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue), and in somewhat more familiar territory, they could be called "orthogonal" meaning that a sum of them can allow to represent any shape in some space - in a similar way as orthogonal vectors of a cartesian coordinate system (i.e. the "1"s on XY axes in 2D, or on XYZ in 3D - or your green/blue/red arrows in Blender) allow to represent any point in that coordinate system.
