splatting

Definition

A rendering technique that projects each 3D element onto the image plane as a footprint with area — a splat — then blends the sorted splats front to back. It is the engine behind 3D Gaussian splatting, which represents a scene as millions of anisotropic Gaussians and rasterizes them, reaching NeRF-level quality at real-time frame rates. The contrast is with ray marching, which integrates samples along each ray instead.