Peter Sanitra from Nvidia dives into Houdini 22's groundbreaking, end-to-end automated Gaussian Splatting pipeline. He breaks down how these point-based anisotropic ellipsoids use spherical harmonics to fake hyper-realistic, view-dependent reflections, specular highlights, and complex volumetric effects like clouds and explosions at a fraction of the standard file size. Peter shows off how to train custom splats using SideFX's native Solaris recipes, animate them seamlessly using traditional rigging and point-deformation tools, and even relight them procedurally inside Copernicus using trained normal and albedo maps.