Case study · Tooling · Unreal Engine 5
Gaussian Capture Rig
A UE5 plugin that builds synthetic 3D Gaussian splatting datasets inside the engine: perfect camera arrays, perfect ground truth, and none of the travel.
- Role
- Sole developer
- Stack
- UE5 · Blueprints · Python
- Output
- COLMAP-ready datasets
The problem
Gaussian splatting is only as good as the capture behind it, and real capture is expensive: a site visit, a permit, a weather window, a rig that has to behave. When a pipeline breaks, you usually cannot go back and shoot it again.
So the reconstruction side needs data it can trust before the truck is booked: known camera positions, known geometry, repeatable conditions.
What I built
A plugin that lives inside Unreal Engine 5 and treats the level as the location. You place a rig, define the array, and it renders out a full dataset with exact camera intrinsics and extrinsics attached, the thing COLMAP normally has to guess at.
From there the set goes through the same route as real footage: COLMAP, Postshot or SuperSplat, then back into Unreal as a splat. The difference is that this time you know exactly what the answer was supposed to be.
Pipeline
- 01Scene and rig setupUE5 level, camera array defined in Blueprint
- 02Dataset renderFrames plus camera poses exported together
- 03ReconstructionCOLMAP, then Postshot or SuperSplat
- 04Back into engineSplat re-imported and compared to source geometry
Want this pointed at something of yours?
Capture tooling, reconstruction pipelines, or a site that needs recording properly.