  3D Gaussian splatting, emerging as a groundbreaking approach, has drawn
increasing attention for its capabilities of high-fidelity reconstruction and
real-time rendering. However, it couples the appearance and geometry of the
scene within the Gaussian attributes, which hinders the flexibility of editing
operations, such as texture swapping. To address this issue, we propose a novel
approach, namely Texture-GS, to disentangle the appearance from the geometry by
representing it as a 2D texture mapped onto the 3D surface, thereby
facilitating appearance editing. Technically, the disentanglement is achieved
by our proposed texture mapping module, which consists of a UV mapping MLP to
learn the UV coordinates for the 3D Gaussian centers, a local Taylor expansion
of the MLP to efficiently approximate the UV coordinates for the ray-Gaussian
intersections, and a learnable texture to capture the fine-grained appearance.
Extensive experiments on the DTU dataset demonstrate that our method not only
facilitates high-fidelity appearance editing but also achieves real-time
rendering on consumer-level devices, e.g. a single RTX 2080 Ti GPU.
