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Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry

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The Setup:https://i.imgur.com/o0hgybh.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/mcNiomp.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/vIjw6pc.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/nzOwmSC.jpeg

HN · launched May 19, 2026 · 530 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views

Niche: 3d model and interactive web viewers · 54 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -44% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No This is a photogrammetry dataset and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction requiring specialized physical camera gear, macro focus stacking techniques, and COLMAP reconstruction pipelines.

What it would actually take: Recreating this requires high-end physical camera hardware (such as a Nikon Z8 with macro lens, turntable, and controlled lighting), shooting 90+ multi-focus image stacks, and running software like Helicon Focus. The resulting thousands of images must be processed through COLMAP for Structure from Motion and trained using custom CUDA/Slang Gaussian splatting implementations. It is a physical macro-photography and computational photogrammetry problem, completely outside software vibe-coding.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: phone camera + ffmpeg + colmap + opensplat, COLMAP, traditional polygonal 3D meshes, texture-mapped geometry

Concerns raised: Lighting is baked in, doesn't work with dynamic lighting, Not suitable for animated bodies or skeletal animation, Poor quality on thin or sharp surfaces and reflections, Very memory-hungry (10x data size vs meshes), Can't be lit by scene lights or receive shadows

Feature requests: Better capture of very small object details, Support for skeletal animation and deformation, Integration into Blender rendering pipeline (Cycles/EEVEE), Reduce memory footprint and file size, Improved handling of thin surfaces and reflective materials

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 57 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 58 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 172 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.