# 6DGS: Enhanced Direction-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Volumetric Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04974 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04974/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05606/) (2021)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Ray Tracing: Fast Tracing of Particle Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07090/) (2024)
- [FlashGS: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale and High-resolution Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07967/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [3D-HGS: 3D Half-Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02720/) (2024)
- [3DGS-LM: Faster Gaussian-Splatting Optimization with Levenberg-Marquardt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12892/) (2024)
- [Don't Splat your Gaussians: Volumetric Ray-Traced Primitives for Modeling and Rendering Scattering and Emissive Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15425/) (2024)
- [HeadStudio: Text to Animatable Head Avatars with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06149/) (2024)
- [DDGS-CT: Direction-Disentangled Gaussian Splatting for Realistic Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02518/) (2024)
- [Application of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Cinematic Anatomy on Consumer Class Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11285/) (2024)
- [N-Dimensional Gaussians for Fitting of High Dimensional Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20067/) (2024)
- [Unified Gaussian Primitives for Scene Representation and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09733/) (2024)
- [RayGauss: Volumetric Gaussian-Based Ray Casting for Photorealistic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03356/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [4DGC: Rate-Aware 4D Gaussian Compression for Efficient Streamable Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18421/) (2025)
- [7DGS: Unified Spatial-Temporal-Angular Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07946/) (2025)
- [3DGEER: 3D Gaussian Rendering Made Exact and Efficient for Generic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24053/) (2025)
- [Orientation-anchored Hyper-Gaussian for 4D Reconstruction from Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23492/) (2025)
- [Render-FM: Feedforward Model for Real-time Photorealistic Volumetric Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17338/) (2025)
- [Universal Beta Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03312/) (2025)
- [HyperGaussians: High-Dimensional Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Animatable Face Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02803/) (2025)
- [Splannequin: Freezing Monocular Mannequin-Challenge Footage with Dual-Detection Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05113/) (2025)
- [Gabor Fields: Orientation-Selective Level-of-Detail for Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05081/) (2026)
- [TRiGS: Temporal Rigid-Body Motion for Scalable 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00538/) (2026)
- [XClipGS: Exact Half-Space Clipping for Medical Volume Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07760/) (2026)
- [TraceFlow: Dynamic 3D Reconstruction of Specular Scenes Driven by Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10095/) (2025)
- [Constrained Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03538/) (2026)
- [View-Structured Conformal Prediction for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10307/) (2026)
- [FactorSplat: Appearance-Controllable Gaussian Proxies for Medical Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02382/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Novel view synthesis has advanced significantly with the development of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). However, achieving high quality without compromising real-time rendering remains challenging, particularly for physically-based ray tracing with view-dependent effects. Recently, N-dimensional Gaussians (N-DG) introduced a 6D spatial-angular representation to better incorporate view-dependent effects, but the Gaussian representation and control scheme are sub-optimal. In this paper, we revisit 6D Gaussians and introduce 6D Gaussian Splatting (6DGS), which enhances color and opacity representations and leverages the additional directional information in the 6D space for optimized Gaussian control. Our approach is fully compatible with the 3DGS framework and significantly improves real-time radiance field rendering by better modeling view-dependent effects and fine details. Experiments demonstrate that 6DGS significantly outperforms 3DGS and N-DG, achieving up to a 15.73 dB improvement in PSNR with a reduction of 66.5% Gaussian points compared to 3DGS. The project page is: https://gaozhongpai.github.io/6dgs/