Agree, I'm not sure why you'd think that's the only use case for 3D, unless I misunderstand your argument here.

How would you handle visual effects with point-clouds for example? There are so many use cases for proper 3D, and all I can think of as use-case for point clouds are environments with static lightning, which seems like a really small part of what people generally consider "3D scenes".

Maybe I missed the mark on “gamedev”, but 3D is larger than just “aesthetically pleasing 3D VFX” for its own sake

Often I’m trying to use something as a reference for a design where a 3D model isn’t the actual end goal, or I’m performing analytics on a 3D object (say in my case for a lot of GIS and simulation work)

The whole “mesh is the be all and end all of 3D modelling” irks me as while yes it’s a really important way of representing an object (especially with real time constraints), it doesn’t do justice to the full landscape of techniques and uses for 3D

It would be like 2D sprite artists from the gamedev world saying “what’s the point of all this vector art you illustrators are doing” or “what’s the point of all these wireframe designs you graphic designers are doing” - “these aren’t raster images!”

I suppose my snipe was trying to communicate the idea that 3D is larger than just a vehicle for entertainment production. It intersects many industries that may eschew polygons because real time rendering is irrelevant

3D tooling has uses beyond producing 3D scenes, just as Photoshop is used for more than touching up photographs

Edit: for anyone stuck in a rut with meshes come join the dark side with nurbs - it makes you think about modelling in a radically different way (unfortunate side effect is it makes working with meshes feel so so “dirty”)

No one said this, it seems like you are making up fake questions and not dealing with the actual questions that the person you replied to asked.

You can view point clouds and you can warp them around, but working with them and tracing rays becomes a different story.

Once you need something as a jumping off point to start working with, point clouds are not going to work out anymore. People use polygons for a reason. They have flexible UVs, they can be traced easily, they can be worked with easily, their data is direct, standard and minimal.

This is because a point cloud does not represent a surface or a volume until the points are connected to form, well, a surface or a volume.

And physical problems are most often defined over surfaces or volumes. For instance, waves don't propagate over sparse sets of points, but within continuous domains.

However, for applications where geometric accuracy is needed, I think you wouldn't want to use a method based on a minimal number of photographs anyways. For instance, the Lascaux cavern was mapped in 3D a decade ago based on "good old" algorithms (not machine learning) and instruments (more sophisticated than a phone camera). So these critiques are missing the point, in my opinion. These Gaussian Splatting methods are very impressive for the constraints they operate under!