Summary:
This article explores how digital artist, Dany Bittel, is pioneering macro Gaussian splatting, a technique that transforms focus-stacked macro photography into immersive, photorealistic 3D visualizations. Through persistence and innovation, Bittel has overcome major technical challenges to capture insects in stunning, lifelike detail. This article discusses Dany’s process in detail.
This article was collaboratively written by Nathan Roe, editor at Lidar News, and Dany Bittel, digital artist and macro splat innovator.
If you are interested in collaborating with Lidar News to develop an article like this, please contact nathan.roe@lidarnews.com.
Table of Contents
From 3D Generalist to Splatting Innovator
Introduction to Dany Bittel
Dany Bittel began his career as a 3D generalist before moving into supervision on TV ads and animation. With a strong background in rendering and shading, he was always drawn to the potential of 3D technologies to be photorealistic.
When Gaussian splatting began attracting attention, he immediately saw its potential. Splatting stood out as easy to implement and capable of producing the photorealism he desired.
Why Macro Splatting?
After experimenting with splats of larger objects, such as a room and a stagecoach, Dany sought something more ambitious. He decided to combine his interest in macro photography with Gaussian splatting, an approach he had not seen others implement.
He chose insects as his subject because, “insects are amazing. They are otherworldly and beautiful,” he explained.
Dany’s Macro Workflow at a Glance
Before diving into the details of Dany’s process, it helps to understand the basic workflow.
At its core, the process is built around focus stacking (explained in the glossary below). For macro insect work, Dany typically limits each stack to 16 frames to balance detail against shooting time.
Because the subject needs to be captured from multiple angles, he works with several vertical camera positions. He uses multiple perspectives, photographing a full rotation of the insect at each position. Images are edited using DaVinci Fusion (e.g., correcting diffraction, masking background, adjusting contrast, alpha channel). These images are then fed into COLMAP, an open-source Structure-from-Motion (SfM) tool. COLMAP establishes the camera poses and builds the initial point-based reconstruction. The results are finally processed in Postshot, a Gaussian splatting tool, to generate a 3D splat that can be viewed and explored interactively.
Glossary of Terms
Focus stacking: A method to overcome shallow depth of field in macro photography by taking multiple shots at different focus distances and merging them into one sharp image. This reveals tiny details like hairs or compound eyes that a single shot can’t capture.
Automatic focus rail: A motorized device that moves the entire camera in precise increments for focus stacking, ensuring consistent, repeatable steps. It replaces manual lens focusing and is more precise than built-in focus stacking on most cameras.
Speedlight: A portable, battery-powered flash that attaches to a camera or can be triggered off-camera, providing strong, controllable light.
Extension tubes: Hollow spacers placed between the camera body and lens that convert a normal lens into a macro lens. They shorten the minimum focusing distance but reduce light and increase optical flaws like chromatic aberration.
Diffraction: At very small apertures (e.g., f/18), light bends around the aperture blades and softens fine detail. In macro photography, this loss of sharpness is significant and usually corrected during editing.
Masking: The process of digitally separating a subject from its background with a “mask” that defines which pixels belong to each. Insects are difficult to mask because fine hairs and translucent wings blend with the background.
Unexpected Obstacles of Macro Gaussian Splatting
Not So Easy
What Dany thought would be a quick project stretched into a month-long struggle. After easily splatting a room and a stagecoach, he assumed a bumblebee would not be prohibitively difficult, but the project presented a string of challenges that nearly caused him to give up.
Close Quarters
Working distance quickly became the first obstacle. With the extension tubes mounted, the lens could only focus at about two centimeters from the insect. At that distance, Dany risked bumping the specimen while manually adjusting the focus rail. He used a wooden disk marked in 10-degree increments. Each full rotation required 36 manual rotations, and he had to repeat the process at each vertical camera position. He settled on four vertical positions to limit the total number of rotations.
Crude Camera Rig
The camera setup was equally challenging. Using only a basic ball head made aiming at a subject just centimeters away frustratingly imprecise. If he touched the insect by accident, he had to start the whole process over.
The Background Problem
At first, the background seemed like the least of his worries. He assumed it would be easy to remove later in Postshot (the software used for Gaussian splatting). In practice, it became one of the hardest obstacles.
The issue comes down to how splatting software “learns” a subject. If the background is completely blurred, as it often is in macro photography, the algorithm doesn’t know the background is behind the insect. It is fooled into thinking there is a fog around the insect that has the color of the background. As a result, it puts big floating splats with the background color around the insect. The color of the insect is adjusted to counteract the haze. For example, if you use a black background, it will make the insect much brighter to offset the dark fog surrounding it.
Hand Masking
Dany shot against a black background with a single speedlight and used brightness-based masking (luma key). That proved insufficient, so he ultimately hand-edited masks for all 144 images, a task that took two days. This was after reshooting the subject three times, each shoot taking a full day. At one point, another error in the masking process forced him to redo even more work.
The process proved so time-consuming and error-prone that Dany nearly abandoned the project. Despite these frustrations, when Dany finally posted the result on superspl.at and Reddit, the response stunned him. Viewers praised the novelty and detail, even though he still saw imperfections and room for improvement. The enthusiasm convinced him to continue refining his approach.
Toward a Smarter Workflow
Automation Needed
After the frustrations of the first attempt, it became clear that some degree of automation was essential. Manually cranking a focus rail and rotating a specimen by hand wasn’t sustainable.
Automating the Focus Rail and Turntable
The biggest challenge was mounting an automatic focus rail so it could rotate vertically around the specimen while always staying aimed at it. Dany solved this by attaching the rail to a boom arm on his tripod, which he eventually had to glue in place for stability.
The camera and focus rail are run through Helicon Remote, which automates both photo capture and the fine forward movements needed for focus stacking. The specimen sits on an automatic rotary disk controlled by a script, allowing precise rotations without the risk of bumping it by hand.
These improvements cut the photoshoot time down to about four hours. A shorter shoot reduces the chance of the insect shifting position and limits drying, which can distort color and form. One limitation remains: DSLRs struggle with this kind of continuous capture, so Dany recommends using a mirrorless camera for smoother operation.
With automation in place, he could expand his shooting strategy. Instead of just four positions, he now captures eight vertical perspectives, with 9–20 rotations per perspective depending on subject complexity. This denser coverage improves the overall distribution and quality of images.
Editing and Pre-Processing in DaVinci Fusion
After the photographs are captured and stacked, they still need careful editing before being sent to Postshot. Dany handles this in DaVinci Fusion, the compositing tool inside DaVinci Resolve, where he cleans and prepares each image.
The first step is correcting diffraction. Instead of a complex deconvolution algorithm, Dany uses a simpler but effective method: he creates a blurred copy of the image and subtracts it from the original. Sometimes he repeats the process with two blur radii to recover both coarse and fine details. While not mathematically exact, this technique sharpens edges and restores enough clarity for splatting to work well.
Next comes masking, made easier by photographing the insect against a blue background. In Fusion, Dany keys out the blue to separate subject from background, then applies despill to remove the faint blue halo that often clings to translucent hairs or wings. Once isolated, he fine-tunes the subject with curve adjustments, boosting contrast and lowering highlight saturation slightly so glossy cuticles and wing membranes don’t appear blown out.
At this stage he adjusts the fringes of the masks and ensures the export is set to straight alpha rather than premultiplied, which is necessary for processing in Postshot. With this mask, even the wings separate well into highlights and transparency and don’t need any special treatment during training.
Although the market for insect splats may be small, their potential uses are broad – education, scientific reference, museum exhibitions, and art. Just as stock photography opened access to rare images, macro splats could someday provide a shared library of natural micro-worlds.
For Dany, the reward lies in both the process and the result. “Despite all the hardship I really enjoy making it. The fusion of nature, photography, and computer imagery really resonates with me. I do think Gaussian splats are a 3D photo, not a scan. The insect you pick, the pose you mount it in, and how you light it, it’s the same creative decision-making as photography.”
Support Dany’s Work
Dany has created a Patreon page where supporters can follow his progress or contribute directly. Joining is free, with additional tiers for those who want deeper access to his work. His interactive splats are available on SuperSplat. For more information about Dany, visit www.danybittel.ch.
For another interesting application of Gaussian splatting, read about ‘Splatcubes’ – a technique for printing 3D Gaussian splats.
