factoria 2018

Reconstruction of a mall as captured in Winter 2018, in gaussian splat form. Splats were created in Nerfstudio using Splatfacto and rendered in UE5 using the Luma AI plugin. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/luma-ai

I started this project out of nostalgia for this mall, which is near my old high school. I noticed a lot of stores going out of business and wanted to preserve some semblance of them before they went away. The mall as of 2024 does not look too different but I think 4-5 stores have closed since then.

Although some sections look pretty good, overall it looks pretty messy due to poor data collection.. I was also surprised to find that certain mall sections could not be constructed at all, when in a previous attempt at this I was able to construct those sections using RealityCapture. I may try later to import the old RealityCapture data into Nerfstudio since that is a supported feature. I could also try re-doing this with RealityCapture meshes virtualized in Nanite, but I like how the splats are easily culled in the Luma plugin.

Mac build - tested on M1 Macbook Pro, 20-30 FPS with some weird mouse issues.

Windows build - tested on Acer Swift X SFX14, 30-40 FPS

Project files require the Luma plugin linked above to be installed; I used UE 5.3.2.

Notes on the nerfstudio installation and usage process here https://www.idkwhojamesis.com/updates/nerfstudio-on-aws/