M51 LOD Testing

Testing the LOD code with the M51 data and a section of the most recent camera move.

One thing I noticed was that using gaussian splats removes a lot of the speckly feel I was getting with the trapezoidal splats. 

4835232 Trapezoidal Splats, no LOD, 2.5 min

4835232 Square Root Splats, no LOD, 2.63 min

4835232 Gaussian Splats, 2782650 LOD Splats, 10.82 min

The issue is that gaussian splat type right now adds an extreme amount of LOD spawned splats to the render set, causing huge render time increases.  Not sure if this is supposed to happen or if its a bug in the program. 

Also, closer to the galaxy, the stars start to blow out despite having the same exposure as farther away.  This is without any extra LOD particles, so its just the fact that the camera is closer to the data set.  We'll need some way of animating the exposure over multiple frames.

Trapezoidal Splats, no LOD, exp= 0.005

Trapezoidal Splats, no LOD, exp = 0.001