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Gaussian splatting methods are emerging as a popular approach for converting multi-view image data into scene representations that allow view synthesis. In particular, there is interest in enabling view synthesis for dynamic scenes using only monocular input data---an ill-posed and challenging problem. The fast pace of work in this area has produced multiple simultaneous papers that claim to work best, which cannot all be true. In this work, we organize, benchmark, and analyze many Gaussian-splatting-based methods, providing apples-to-apples comparisons that prior works have lacked. We use multiple existing datasets and a new instructive synthetic dataset designed to isolate factors that affect reconstruction quality. We systematically categorize Gaussian splatting methods into specific motion representation types and quantify how their differences impact performance. Empirically, we find that their rank order is well-defined in synthetic data, but the complexity of real-world data currently overwhelms the differences. Furthermore, the fast rendering speed of all Gaussian-based methods comes at the cost of brittleness in optimization. We summarize our experiments into a list of findings that can help to further progress in this lively problem setting. 

QuadriFlow is a scalable algorithm for generating quadrilateral surface meshes based on the Instant Field-Aligned Meshes of Jakob et al. (ACM Trans. Graph. 34(6):189, 2015). We modify the original algorithm such that it efficiently produces meshes with many fewer singularities. Singularities in quadrilateral meshes cause problems for many applications, including parametrization and rendering with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Singularities can rarely be entirely eliminated, but it is possible to keep their number small. Local optimization algorithms usually produce meshes with many singularities, whereas the best algorithms tend to require non-local optimization, and therefore are slow. We propose an efficient method to minimize singularities by combining the Instant Meshes objective with a system of linear and quadratic constraints. These constraints are enforced by solving a global minimum-cost network flow problem and local boolean satisfiability problems. We have verified the robustness and efficiency of our method on a subset of ShapeNet comprising 17,791 3D objects in the wild. Our evaluation shows that the quality of the quadrangulations generated by our method is as good as, if not better than, those from other methods, achieving about four times fewer singularities than Instant Meshes. Other algorithms that produce similarly few singularities are much slower; we take less than ten seconds to process each model. Our source code is publicly available.