XGRIDS builds 23.5-square-kilometer 3D Gaussian model for China Media Group documentary on Minning Town

The report said the model captures the town's entrance archway, red-roofed and white-walled blocks, roads leading outward and wind turbines turning in front of the mountains in one continuous digital space. The documentary uses two kinds of imagery for the town's past and present: AI reconstructions based on historical materials for the Gobi desert and mud-brick houses that left no 3D records, and 3D Gaussian splatting for today's Minning Town.

The field data collection for the 23.5-square-kilometer town was completed by three collectors over seven days. Drones carrying collection equipment flew over Minning Town, while the Lingguang L2 Pro spatial scanner and Lingshi P1 spatial camera were used on the ground in streets, roads and villages. The 186,000 images and 15 billion radar point-cloud points were gathered as multimodal data, according to the report.

Processing was done locally. LCC Studio's air-ground fusion function combined aerial and ground perspectives into the same space. Multi-SLAM solved laser data into a 150-billion-point point cloud, establishing geometric relationships among eaves, roads and buildings. LCC Studio then trained 6.2 billion Gaussian ellipsoids from the multimodal data to restore light, shadow, color and materials. The report said reconstruction geometric accuracy reached the centimeter level, with reconstruction error better than 2 centimeters.

The project produced a single continuous model for the full 23.5 square kilometers rather than separately reconstructed blocks that must be stitched together. The report said seams, color differences and geometric misalignment are difficult to avoid in large-area scenes, but the digital Minning Town has no breakpoints from the town entrance to the village end. Under traditional methods, the report said, a scene of this scale would be difficult to reconstruct with high fidelity and even harder to use directly in film and television production.

The project took seven days of field collection by three people and 14 days of processing for the billion-level Gaussian data. To bring the 6.2 billion Gaussians into film production, XGRIDS used LCC Plugin for UE. The report described it as the first Unreal Engine plugin for billion-level 3D Gaussians, allowing the whole digital Minning Town to be imported, edited, relit and rendered directly in Unreal Engine. The report said no other UE Gaussian plugin on the market can currently handle this scale. Shots that sweep through streets and pass through the archway avenue in the documentary were completed in the digital Minning Town.

Minning Town's story is tied to cooperation between eastern and western China. In 1996, Fujian and Ningxia established a paired assistance relationship. The following year, Minning Village was built on the Gobi desert at the eastern foot of the Helan Mountains, and the first migrants from Xihaigu settled there. The initial resident population was more than 8,000. After three decades of construction, the area is now Minning Town, with one community and six administrative villages, and has grown from Minning Village into an immigration demonstration town with more than 60,000 people. The report said the documentary's past and present images make the 30-year distance tangible.

The report linked the project to China's policy on developing new quality productive forces. It cited the Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council opinion, which calls for high technology, high efficiency and high quality, and for deeper integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation. The digital Minning Town was described as a practice of new quality productive forces in cultural communication, with XGRIDS technology supporting a national-level documentary. XGRIDS said it was honored that domestically developed spatial intelligence technology participated in recording this history.

XGRIDS is a national-level specialized and innovative key little giant enterprise. The report said its products were included in the Shenzhen First Set of Major Technical Equipment Promotion and Application Guidance Catalog, and that it has built a complete technology system from spatial collection and 3D Gaussian generation to compression, editing and application deployment. It holds more than 100 invention patents and serves more than 8,000 customers in more than 80 countries. The open LCC format has been made compatible with dozens of domestic and international platforms, including NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Sketchup, Revit, 3DS Max and SuperMap, according to the report.

The company says its mission is to turn the real world into spaces that can be walked into, created in and built upon. From rooms and blocks to a 23.5-square-kilometer town, the technology has now entered a national-level documentary. The report said the 2026 Minning Town has been preserved as an enterable, measurable and comparable 3D space, so that future generations of the first migrants can one day walk into the town as it appeared at this time.