Bentley Systems has rolled out a technical preview of Gaussian Splatting inside iTwin Capture Modeler, marking the first time the company’s flagship reality modeling tool can output splat based reconstructions alongside its traditional reality meshes. It’s a quiet but consequential step: by embracing splats, the iTwin platform can now deliver richly detailed radiance fields that capture reflective cables, lattice towers, and translucent materials with far less cleanup than conventional photogrammetry workflows.
Gaussian Splatting stores each sample as a 3D Gaussian with color, opacity, and size, allowing iTwin to bypass heavy meshing and render directly from volume data. The result is a smoother, more organic visual that faithfully preserves fine structure, think of those communication-tower antenna arrays where wires often collapse into a blur in mesh form.
Bentley has folded the new pipeline into the familiar “Production” dialog. Once a job finishes, rerunning it with tweaked parameters is dramatically faster thanks to caching, and you can surgically polish the output afterward with the in viewer Edit Gaussian Splats tool.
Three precision tiers shape the trade-off between speed and fidelity. Moderate keeps things lightweight for quick iteration, Standard strikes the recommended balance for everyday work, and Maximum unlocks every last pixel of detail, provided your GPU has the VRAM to match.
A separate Filtering slider tackles visual clutter. Leaving it at None preserves every computed splat, while Minimal and Moderate quietly discard the out-sized blobs that can slow navigation. Cranking the dial up to Extensive performs aggressive pruning for ultra clean walk-throughs, but at the risk of erasing real structure. Either way, filtering targets only splat size, not “floaters,” so those stubborn outliers still require a manual pass.
For context-heavy scenes, say, a cell tower surrounded by foliage, you can choose to keep splats that lie just outside your formal region of interest, giving reviewers a bit of environmental grounding without bloating file size.
Because the feature is still in technical preview, Bentley limits Gaussian Splatting to the Windows desktop edition of iTwin Capture Modeler for now. Cloud processing support is “coming soon.”
With this release, Bentley joins a swelling roster of enterprise software vendors adopting splat first pipelines. For reality capture teams already invested in the iTwin ecosystem, it means one less detour and a faster path from raw photos to lifelike, lightweight digital twins that hold up under real time scrutiny.
