Make It Flow: Animating Water in 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes

Abstract

Explicit 3D scene representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have recently enabled high-quality, real-time novel view synthesis. However, these methods assume static scenes, limiting realism in the presence of dynamic phenomena ubiquitous in real-world environments. While coherent motion (e.g., humans or vehicles) can be captured and reconstructed, high-frequency effects such as flowing water remain intractable under casual capture conditions, where dense multi-view, high-speed acquisition is not feasible. We present a method to animate water in static 3DGS scenes, enabling visually plausible motion without requiring dynamic capture or physical simulation. Our approach estimates 2D optical flow from reference images or model renderings and lifts it into a consistent 3D Eulerian motion field. We propose a cinemagraph-inspired algorithm that applies this motion field to deform Gaussian primitives, producing temporally seamless looping animations. The resulting representation retains real-time rendering performance, significantly enhances perceptual realism, and preserves free-viewpoint navigation within the scene. We evaluate our method on a newly captured dataset of in-the-wild waterfall scenes and demonstrate clear improvements over prior work in dynamic Gaussian splatting and 3D cinemagraph generation in visual quality and computational efficiency.