A while ago Teng Xu from crysta.ai contacted me and offered to print one of my insects as a present. Ever since I'm fascinated by the process, the possibilities and was really excited to finally get my hands on the print!

We had a little bit of back and forth to negotiate the best possible quality. As you can't print view dependent color, I decided to directly train it with spherical harmonics at level 0. Instead of later averaging it. I also trained it in linear space, to hopefully get more physical plausible transparency values, in hindsight, I'm not sure if that was a good idea, as the people from crysta had to adjust their pipeline.

The Gaussian splat is first voxelated, a bit like a Minecraft level. Each voxel has a mix of inks and can be more or less transparent. This then get's printed on special 3d printer , layer by layer.

The resulting piece of "crystal", is honestly so cool. It's a modern version of amber. You can trap stuff for eternity.…