Babylon.js 9.27.1 Puts Gaussian Splats in Frame Graph

Babylon.js 9.27.1 adds Gaussian splats to the frame graph geometry renderer, which lets a splat scene write native GLSL and WGSL geometry outputs.

Babylon.js has carried dedicated Gaussian splat mesh and material classes since V8, and V9.0 added shadow casting, SOG loading and material plugin extension. All of it ran through the regular object renderer, because the splat shaders had no prepass branches to write with.

Both the GLSL and WGSL gaussianSplatting fragment shaders now carry those branches, writing position, local position, depth, normalized view depth, normal, world normal, albedo and velocity into the multiple render target attachments. Bounding boxes, edges, outlines and overlays render into beauty only, leaving the geometry attachments untouched. Automatic Gaussian geometry output covers GaussianSplattingMaterial, and custom Gaussian NodeMaterial graphs keep their explicitly connected prepass outputs. Translucent geometry retains the existing single pass approximation.

FrameGraphGeometryRendererTask also gains an optional FrameGraphObjectList.spriteManagers selection, where omitting it or passing null selects the scene managers and an empty array selects none. Sprites, CPU particles and GPU particles received the same native geometry outputs in the same change, with particles writing neutral velocity values.

The pull request reports byte for byte beauty comparisons between the geometry path and the regular object renderer path on a 786,233 splat Gaussian model, and seven first frame visualization cases run across WebGL2 and WebGPU. Its body opens by stating that the pull request was created by the create-pr skill.

Two smaller splat changes shipped in the same tag. One applies a per axis focal correction so Gaussian splatting renders correctly under a horizontal fixed field of view, and the other stops a static splat part from disappearing after a streaming compound is compacted.

The frame graph work is exposed in the Node Render Graph Editor as well as in code, and the engine remains Apache 2.0. Babylon.js 9.27.1 is available now on npm.