150-Camera Gaussian Splat Good Food Ad: Powered by Xangle
Earlier this year, The Electric Lens Company (ELC) and The Splice Boys joined forces once again, this time for a commercial campaign with The Producers for The Good Food Guide. The project built upon years of technical R&D and a shared passion for pushing boundaries in visual storytelling, especially through emerging formats like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS).
At its core, the project explored what ELC calls a Volumetric Photograph, a dynamic scene captured as a navigable 3D dataset, rendered with photographic realism from any angle. It’s the evolution of photogrammetry, delivering more than just geometry and textures: it recreates the specular, real-world feel of light bouncing off objects. Fire, sauce droplets, smoke, elements that once disappeared in flat reconstructions, now remain alive in 3D space.
The heart of the capture was a 150-camera array assembled by The Splice Boys. Unlike traditional single-lens setups, this array doesn’t focus on one frame. It captures an entire volume of light data from dozens of angles at once, critical for 3DGS workflows. The rig was designed for flexibility, moving through multiple shoot locations, often covering 120 to 140 degrees of field.
To control this complex setup, The Splice Boys used Xangle Camera Server. The software enabled USB-triggered camera control, synchronization of settings, and streamlined batch downloads across the entire array. It also provided a clean interface for dataset review and image organization, ensuring efficient handoff into post-production.
Post-production was anything but standard. RAW images were developed with extreme care, bypassing common Lightroom limitations via custom workflows that preserved dynamic range in Rec2020 PQ PNGs. Alignment in Reality Capture came next, followed by 3DGS model training in PostShot. The team used novel methods to crop, layer, and even composite different splats into unified scenes. For example, removing structural elements from one scene revealed characters behind it, while fire from another take was added seamlessly into the final image.
The result: a high-resolution, immersive narrative capturing the scene as it was! It was a technical achievement and creative milestone, signaling the potential of volumetric capture not just for experimental shorts or museum installations, but for mainstream commercial content.