Hey Babylon community,
I’d like to share something I built on Babylon.js: an interactive Moon base you
can fly around in the browser.
Live: Concept 001: Moon Base — de Gerlache Crater · FarsideLab
It’s the first concept in FarsideLab — an interactive catalogue of realistic
space-engineering concepts. This one is a south-pole base based on published NASA
architecture, sitting on real lunar terrain. Everything you see is Gaussian
splats, rendered with Babylon.js.
── The pipeline ──
- Real NASA 5 m/px elevation data, displaced at true scale in Blender 5.1
- Lit at correct solar values and path-traced in Cycles
- Camera datasets exported in COLMAP format straight from Blender, via a custom add-on I wrote for this. So there’s no photogrammetry step and the poses are exact (zero pose error; the splats are trained purely from synthetic renders)
- Gaussians trained in LichtFeld Studio
- Compressed to SOG and streamed, rendered in Babylon.js
── The scene ──
It isn’t one big splat, it’s several, streamed and swapped as you move:
- Main 3D window — 1.07 M Gaussians · 15.6 MB
- de Gerlache Crater — 0.6 M · 8.75 MB
- Blue Origin Mk2 site (published design) — 0.30 M · 5.39 MB
- SpaceX HLS (published design) — 0.6 M · 9.16 MB
- Base — 0.34 M · 5.63 MB
── A bit about me ──
My background is 3D modelling, rendering, animation and VFX, not so much web dev or coding. Claude Code has been helping me build the web side, and I’m on a fast learning curve because I want to actually understand and keep control of what I’m doing.
── Where I’d love the community’s input ──
I’m still relatively new to splats in Babylon and I’m sure I’m leaving performance on the table. A few things thinking:
- Best practices for streaming/swapping multiple splat sets without hitches
- Sorting/rendering cost as splat count climbs
- Memory management across several loaded scenes on lower-end devices
Any tips, critique, or “you’re doing X the hard way” are very welcome!
── Promotion ──
Happy to have this shared around, thank you! 
- A visual catalog of space engineering: https://farsidelab.com
- My page: https://vidro.fi
- YouTube: @G_P_U
- X/Twitter: @NjdKari
Thanks for an engine that makes this kind of thing possible.
Kari Nöjd