# GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 252 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 252)

- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [DN-Splatter: Depth and Normal Priors for Gaussian Splatting and Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17822/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [GIR: 3D Gaussian Inverse Rendering for Relightable Scene Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05133/) (2023)
- [GaussianGrasper: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Open-vocabulary Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09637/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [Spec-Gaussian: Anisotropic View-Dependent Appearance for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15870/) (2024)
- [Analytic-Splatting: Anti-Aliased 3D Gaussian Splatting via Analytic Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11056/) (2024)
- [Meta 3D AssetGen: Text-to-Mesh Generation with High-Quality Geometry, Texture, and PBR Materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02445/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting with Deferred Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18454/) (2024)
- [Radiative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient X-ray Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04116/) (2024)
- [DiffusionRenderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering with Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18590/) (2025)
- [Texture-GS: Disentangling the Geometry and Texture for 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10050/) (2024)
- [GI-GS: Global Illumination Decomposition on Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02619/) (2024)
- [DeferredGS: Decoupled and Editable Gaussian Splatting with Deferred Shading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09412/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [UniRelight: Learning Joint Decomposition and Synthesis for Video Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15673/) (2025)
- [3DRealCar: An In-the-wild RGB-D Car Dataset with 360-degree Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04875/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splashing: Unified Particles for Versatile Motion Synthesis and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15318/) (2024)
- [A Diffusion Approach to Radiance Field Relighting using Multi-Illumination Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08947/) (2024)
- [LUDVIG: Learning-Free Uplifting of 2D Visual Features to Gaussian Splatting Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14462/) (2024)
- [HDR-GS: Efficient High Dynamic Range Novel View Synthesis at 1000x Speed via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15125/) (2024)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03175/) (2024)
- [EnvGS: Modeling View-Dependent Appearance with Environment Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15215/) (2024)
- [Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01157/) (2025)
- [Baking Gaussian Splatting into Diffusion Denoiser for Fast and Scalable Single-stage Image-to-3D Generation and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14384/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advent of neural 3D Gaussians has recently brought about a revolution in the field of neural rendering, facilitating the generation of high-quality renderings at real-time speeds. However, the explicit and discrete representation encounters challenges when applied to scenes featuring reflective surfaces. In this paper, we present GaussianShader, a novel method that applies a simplified shading function on 3D Gaussians to enhance the neural rendering in scenes with reflective surfaces while preserving the training and rendering efficiency. The main challenge in applying the shading function lies in the accurate normal estimation on discrete 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we proposed a novel normal estimation framework based on the shortest axis directions of 3D Gaussians with a delicately designed loss to make the consistency between the normals and the geometries of Gaussian spheres. Experiments show that GaussianShader strikes a commendable balance between efficiency and visual quality. Our method surpasses Gaussian Splatting in PSNR on specular object datasets, exhibiting an improvement of 1.57dB. When compared to prior works handling reflective surfaces, such as Ref-NeRF, our optimization time is significantly accelerated (23h vs. 0.58h). Please click on our project website to see more results.