We've been leaning away from pure polygons for decades, anyway. Vertex skinning, SDFs, volumetrics, simulation, and a lot more.
The meshes in a From Software game are for exmple hilariously simple, most of the animation is force simulation to make the famous "frizzles" that they like.
The "vertex" in "vertex skinning" is really just "a thing with a position that gets moved."
p' = Σ wᵢ · Mᵢ · p
It's just a position. Triangles can come along for the ride downstream, but they're not essential, which is one of the reasons it's so efficient for some stuff. Polygons are the optimal surface - but surfaces are often extraneous.
Take all this a few hefty grains of salt, I'm an amateur in the field. My 3d/CAD work is strictly in support of my enterprise stuff. And making wicked battlemaps for gaming VTTs, natch.
But I will stand by the overarching statement that polygons are in fact an abstraction, and bridging that abstraction with whatever is in splats would be wicked awesome.
If you can sample points inside a volume, in theory you could do that with splat geometry. If someone figures out a way to pass in animation time to a sampler, sample along geometry/wireframe or something else, and keep it from overly twinkling it might change everything.
I’m hand waving all the complexity into “if done one figures out”, of course.
I just don’t see why this method can’t evolve in the way diffusion models have evolved (knowing very little of the geberative mechanics of splats).
Not sure that's what you mean, but there was recently a paper where they put meshless (e.g. voxel or SDF) geometry in an animated tetrahedral mesh "cage" and then animate the meshless model by animating the mesh cage:
https://diglib.eg.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/bd94e19b-98...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6lKAvxV2mno
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3c3-ue-fd88
Though this currently isn't compatible with 3DGS if I understand the limitations section correctly.
> Finally, our method operates unordered, limiting its suitability for complex volumetric effects. However, a potential solution lies in sorting the generated intervals for proper blending. This enhancement could improve our approach’s compatibility with various meshless representations, such as radiance fields and volumetric lighting.
