3Dflow has released 3DF Zephyr 9.0, folding Gaussian Splatting generation directly into its structure from motion photogrammetry pipeline and, exposing that workflow all the way down to the entry level 3DF Zephyr Lite tier rather than gating it behind the top Pro and Aerial editions.
For the Verona based vendor's long established SfM/MVS suite, the tool practitioners already reach for to solve camera poses, build sparse and dense point clouds, mesh, texture, and generate orthophotos, splats now becomes simply another reconstruction output that comes out of the same project, sitting alongside the point cloud and the mesh.
Zephyr already computes exactly the inputs a gaussian splatting trainer needs, oriented cameras and reconstructed geometry, so the path of least resistance has been to write those out and let someone else's optimizer finish the job. RealityCapture took that route when RealityCapture 1.5 added radiance field and COLMAP export, and Agisoft did the same when Metashape added COLMAP export to its Standard license, in both cases handing posed cameras off to external trainers such as LichtFeld Studio or Postshot. Zephyr 9.0 goes the other way and performs the generation in app, closer in spirit to how SketchUp added native Gaussian splatting support. The splat is produced inside the same application that solved the capture, not exported to be trained elsewhere.
The release also treats splats as scene objects. 3Dflow's 9.0 changelog explicitly added support for exporting Gaussian Splatting objects, and the merge workspace operation now correctly includes Gaussian Splatting objects, so a generated splat can be carried across workspaces and written out like any other Zephyr result. What the release page and changelog do not specify is the substance of the trainer itself: the optimization method, whether generation runs on the GPU, the exported file format (PLY, SPZ, or otherwise), and the spherical harmonic degree. What can be said without guessing is that the workflow builds on Zephyr's existing camera orientation and SfM/MVS reconstruction.
The remainder of 9.0 rounds out that capture to splat path and the wider photogrammetry workflow. A new Video Stream preset targets sequential walkthrough and video stream datasets, which is a natural feed for splat generation. Photoconsistency has been sped up for large point counts and satellite and hybrid map tiles now render inside the Zephyr viewport. A new tripod camera controller, similar to the one in 3DF Scarlet, eases placing control points and drawing on bubble view images.
The selection tooling has been unified so that the By Hand, Plane, Color, Points, and Triangles subtools share a consistent target selector across all, visible, or specific objects, with volume of interest selection available across every subtool, and the point filtering tool now accepts meshes as input.
Elsewhere there is a new antialiased viewport grid, ESRI i3s tiled-mesh export, and custom reference system conversion on export for every object type. New batch processing dialogs prepare .zep files for AI masking and AI classification training pipelines, and the update also brings pseudo Mercator support, automatic online lookup of projected reference systems, CSV export of camera statistics and reprojection data for forensic work, clarified GCP versus Check Point terminology and reporting, updated ffmpeg libraries that add HEIF video support, and high-DPI layout fixes.
This continues to expand the number of offerings that teams can use to process gaussian splatting reconstructions. With the many team that already trusts Zephyr to solve a difficult capture can now get a gaussian splat as a native output of that same solve, this will only increase the presence of the radiance field representation out in the world.
