# Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18625 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18625/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [GaussianEditor: Swift and Controllable 3D Editing with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14521/) (2023)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (2018)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [MoDec-GS: Global-to-Local Motion Decomposition and Temporal Interval Adjustment for Compact Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03714/) (2025)
- [Neural Shell Texture Splatting: More Details and Fewer Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20200/) (2025)
- [SVGS: Enhancing Gaussian Splatting Using Primitives with Spatially Varying Colors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18966/) (2024)
- [Splat the Net: Radiance Fields with Splattable Neural Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08491/) (2025)
- [Content-Aware Texturing for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02621/) (2025)
- [Holistic Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction via Mixed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23280/) (2025)
- [Decomposing Densification in Gaussian Splatting for Faster 3D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20239/) (2025)
- [Universal Beta Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03312/) (2025)
- [Nexels: Neurally-Textured Surfels for Real-Time Novel View Synthesis with Sparse Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13796/) (2025)
- [DiffSoup: Direct Differentiable Rasterization of Triangle Soup for Extreme Radiance Field Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27151/) (2026)
- [Neural Harmonic Textures for High-Quality Primitive Based Neural Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01204/) (2026)
- [RGS-DR: Deferred Reflections and Residual Shading in 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18468/) (2025)
- [TextureSplat: Per-Primitive Texture Mapping for Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13348/) (2025)
- [Power Foam: Unifying Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing and Rasterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24994/) (2026)
- [STRinGS: Selective Text Refinement in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07230/) (2025)
- [Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15941/) (2026)
- [Depth Peeling for High-Fidelity Gaussian-Enhanced Surfel Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25345/) (2026)
- [On the Geometric Accuracy of Implicit and Primitive-based Representations Derived from View Rendering Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10241/) (2025)
- [IBGS: Image-Based Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14357/) (2025)
- [FACT-GS: Frequency-Aligned Complexity-Aware Texture Reparameterization for 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23292/) (2025)
- [GTAvatar: Bridging Gaussian Splatting and Texture Mapping for Relightable and Editable Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09162/) (2025)
- [A2TG: Adaptive Anisotropic Textured Gaussians for Efficient 3D Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09243/) (2026)
- [GS-Surrogate: Deformable Gaussian Splatting for Parameter Space Exploration of Ensemble Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06358/) (2026)
- [Hybrid Latents: Geometry-Appearance-Aware Surfel Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14928/) (2026)
- [Fixed-Budget Gaussian Volume Encoding with Structure-Aware Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14112/) (2026)
- [Mesh-Learner: Texturing Mesh with Spherical Harmonics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19938/) (2025)
- [Towards High-Fidelity Gaussian Splatting with Queried-Convolution Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12898/) (2025)
- [ASAP-Textured Gaussians: Enhancing Textured Gaussians with Adaptive Sampling and Anisotropic Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14039/) (2025)
- [SurfelSoup: Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression With a Probablistic SurfelTree Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00186/) (2026)
- [Less Gaussians, Texture More: 4K Feed-Forward Textured Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25745/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and rendering technique due to its high-quality results and fast training and rendering time. However, pixels covered by the same Gaussian are always shaded in the same color up to a Gaussian falloff scaling factor. Furthermore, the finest geometric detail any individual Gaussian can represent is a simple ellipsoid. These properties of 3DGS greatly limit the expressivity of individual Gaussian primitives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from texture and alpha mapping in traditional graphics and integrate it with 3DGS. Specifically, we propose a new generalized Gaussian appearance representation that augments each Gaussian with alpha~(A), RGB, or RGBA texture maps to model spatially varying color and opacity across the extent of each Gaussian. As such, each Gaussian can represent a richer set of texture patterns and geometric structures, instead of just a single color and ellipsoid as in naive Gaussian Splatting. Surprisingly, we found that the expressivity of Gaussians can be greatly improved by using alpha-only texture maps, and further augmenting Gaussians with RGB texture maps achieves the highest expressivity. We validate our method on a wide variety of standard benchmark datasets and our own custom captures at both the object and scene levels. We demonstrate image quality improvements over existing methods while using a similar or lower number of Gaussians.