Photogrammetry & 3D Capture

Three approaches to capturing the real world in 3D. Neural radiance fields and Gaussian splats for photorealistic volumetric scenes. Photogrammetry for production-ready textured meshes. Point clouds for raw spatial data at scale. Each method has a different output, a different strength, and a different place in the pipeline. These aren't competing technologies — they're complementary tools for different problems. Photogrammetry gives you a mesh you can manipulate, rig, animate, or send to a 3D printer. NeRFs and Gaussian splats give you a scene you can walk through with photorealistic lighting that a mesh can't replicate. Point clouds give you raw spatial truth — the measured coordinates of a space before any interpretation is applied. In practice, they often feed into each other. The same walk-around video footage can produce all three outputs depending on how it's processed.