The Blender Foundation has released Blender 5.3, which adds native import and rendering of 3D Gaussian splats.
The feature was merged through PR 163102 in September, while Blender 5.3 was still in alpha, and until today it ran only in alpha, beta and release candidate builds. Before that, splats reached a stable Blender only through third party add-ons.
Blender 5.3 stores splats as point clouds. The PointCloud data-block gains a Type option with two values, Points and 3D Gaussian Splats, and splat point clouds carry scale, rotation and radiance attributes, the last holding base color, opacity and spherical harmonics. Geometry Nodes gains a Set Point Cloud Type node and an Import SPZ node, and the Import PLY node now outputs a point cloud for splat files and a mesh otherwise, with its output socket renamed to Geometry.
Import covers PLY and every current SPZ version up to and including SPZ 4. The PLY importer detects splat files automatically, and the SPZ importer converts to Blender's axis convention, although files from software that does not follow that convention may need manual adjustment. The USD importer reads the UsdVolParticleField3DGaussianSplat schema, and the glTF importer reads Gaussian splats as well. Blender 5.3 has no splat export.
Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles all render splats, using a default emissive shader driven by the radiance attribute. EEVEE and Workbench rasterize them with EEVEE's dithered transparency mode, which is noisy enough that Blender's developers advise raising the sample count. Cycles finds the point of maximum opacity along each ray, so splats take part in reflections and indirect lighting. Swapping the Emission node for a Diffuse BSDF lets scene lights relight a splat, support the release notes call rudimentary.
The release notes also state that performance is not ideal. Blender assumes splats were trained in sRGB, so rendering is not fully correct in Cycles and EEVEE, which work in linear space, most visibly in areas of low opacity and high radiance. Apply Transform does not work correctly on splats because it does not yet handle the scale, rotation and spherical harmonics attributes.
Several add-ons were built against the 5.3 beta and now have a stable target. SuperSplat for Blender 0.1.0 from PlayCanvas requires 5.3 or later. Iconem's blender_ogc3dtiles needs 5.3 to draw streamed splat 3D Tiles natively, and earlier versions show them as colored points.
Outside splats, Blender 5.3 adds DLSS denoising, Blender Projects, EEVEE Material Lighting nodes, Cycles dispersion and OpenTimelineIO support. Blender 5.3 is free, with full release notes here.
