Our paper “Mesh-Driven 3D Gaussian Splat Manipulation” has been accepted for publication at the Companion Proceedings of the Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D Companion 2026).
The paper introduces a real-time manipulation pipeline for pre-trained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models. By extracting a proxy mesh and linking splats to mesh-driven control points, our approach enables intuitive geometric and appearance editing without retraining or re-optimization.
Overview of the proposed pipeline. A proxy mesh is extracted from a pre-trained 3DGS model and used to drive real-time deformation and appearance manipulation of the underlying splats.
Key Contributions
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Mesh-Driven Editing: We generate a proxy mesh from an existing 3DGS model and use it as an intuitive editing scaffold. This allows artists and developers to use familiar mesh-based workflows while preserving the visual fidelity of the original splat representation.
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Artifact-Resistant Deformation: We introduce a novel coordinate mapping strategy that significantly reduces the “needle” artifacts commonly encountered when deforming anisotropic Gaussian splats. By preserving the distance of control points to the mesh surface during deformation, splats remain well aligned with the underlying geometry.
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Dynamic Lighting Integration: The proxy mesh also acts as a bridge to traditional rendering pipelines, enabling shadow casting, shadow reception, and real-time color modulation from dynamic light sources.
For the full evaluation, qualitative results, and implementation details, please visit the project page
