Rendering glass and mirrors with real-time 3D graphics

Semi-transparent surfaces like glass and mirrors are hard to render because they need sharp reflections *and* clear views through them. RT-Splatting solves this by separating how much space a Gaussian occupies from how much light it blocks, letting the same primitives act as both reflective surfaces and transparent volumes. A new technique called Specular-Aware Gradient Gating prevents the optimizer from sending bad signals to the transparency branch when it encounters shiny surfaces. Results on complex scenes show clearer reflections and transmission than prior work, while maintaining real-time speeds and enabling scene editing.