Deformable Triangle Splatting: Flexible Primitives for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

Recent radiance field methods represent scenes with 2D primitives that offer surface alignment and efficient rasterization, from Gaussian disks to triangles, yet all rely on convex boundaries: curved and concave structures demand excessive primitives. We introduce Deformable Triangle Splatting, which augments each triangle with K control points per edge, each parameterized by a single learnable scalar displacement that shifts the boundary inward or outward, enabling non-convex shape representation while preserving the three base vertices that define the 3D plane. To render these non-convex primitives differentiably, we design a rasterization pipeline in the triangle’s barycentric coordinate space, ensuring view-consistent rendering. A winding number test determines whether each pixel lies inside the deformed primitive, and a window function controlled by two learnable parameters, sharpness and corner smoothness, together with a per-primitive scalar opacity, produces the smooth opacity transition from interior to boundary. Validation is done in a variety of real-world scenes, outperforming recent works based on non-volumetric primitives in terms of visual quality and versatility while still achieving competitive rendering efficiency.