Ideas around point-based rendering have been around for a long time. But, have not been widely used. Hollywood and games might use them for smoke, water, explosions, but rarely for solid objects.

There has been a big explosion of interest in the area since this release of https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/ which proposed a way to generate the point cloud data from photographs in a way that is procedurally a lot like photogrammetry. Hundreds of research projects have spawned off of that paper.

Gaussian splats themselves aren’t very useful for Hollywood because they don’t have any issues with higher cost representations that are more accurate.

That said, Gaussian splats are based on very old papers that do have use in Hollywood. The closest example is radiance caches for Renderman.

This would store points in space with very similar information to a splat, then interpolate between them to provide things like bounce lighting.

The first Pixar film to use this throughout was Up.

> higher cost representations that are more accurate

What are some examples of those representations?

Just standard geometry and materials that they’re willing to spend the time properly constructing and path tracing. Nothing fancy.

They just have a higher up front cost to make than Gaussian splats but are infinitely more directable.

Ultimately the ability to control everything at a micro and macro level is what film wants, not cheap rendering.