Blender Opens Official Design Task for Native Gaussian Splat Import and Rendering

Sergey Sharybin, Blender's Head of Development, opened design task #159470 on June 2 for the "Integration of gaussian splats for IO and rendering." It is the first official commitment to native splat support in Blender itself, and Sharybin has already published a proof of concept branch (tmp_gsplat_io_poc on his fork), writing the next day that he "might give implementation a crack soon."

Splats will be represented as Blender's existing Point Cloud objects carrying attributes, position, scale, quaternion rotation, opacity, and spherical harmonic coefficients stored as float3 attributes named sh_<m>_<l>, deliberately matching OpenUSD's convention. A new "Render As: Points / Splats" toggle and a spherical harmonics degree property hang off that representation. The initial scope is import and rendering only. Reconstruction from images is currently out.

On formats, the task plans PLY import with automatic PLY detection, PLY export, and SPZ import and export. The post seems to lean towards writing its own SPZ implementation rather than depending on Niantic's upstream library, citing multi version support, half float handling, and zero copy reads. A geometry nodes PLY import node is planned as a lightweight streaming path, and glTF's KHR_gaussian_splatting extension, with SPZ and L-GSC compression, is a stretch goal pending ratification of the extension.

Rendering lands first in Workbench and EEVEE using dithered opacity, with mip-splatting anti-aliasing support and no material system integration initially. Cycles support via ellipsoid primitives, proper sorting or hybrid approaches, and editing tools are listed as follow ups. The stated performance target is 10 million points comfortably, pushing toward 100 million.

Until now, splats entered Blender exclusively through add-ons, KIRI Engine's plugin, BlendSplat's geometry nodes approach, and others we've tracked in our engine support guide.

No target release or milestone is set yet, but a design task authored by the Head of Development, with a working PoC branch attached, is exciting to see. I will monitor the progress closely.