D5 Render 3.1 Adds Ray-Traced Gaussian Splatting and .sog XR Tour Pipeline

D5 has released D5 Render 3.1, a build of its GPU accelerated real time archviz engine that makes imported gaussian splats participate in its path tracer and rebuilds the XR Tour capture pipeline around a compact .sog container. Gaussian Splatting assets now correctly participate in global illumination, reflection, and shadow calculations in ray tracing mode. Those two 3DGS updates sit inside a much larger 3.1 update.

The path tracing addition closes the obvious gap left by version 3.0, which introduced experimental import of common 3DGS formats such as PLY and placed reconstructions alongside traditional geometry, lighting, and cameras, as covered in earlier reporting on that release, but left the splats inert under the renderer's light transport. A reconstruction could be positioned and displayed in a scene, yet it neither cast nor received bounced light, appeared in reflections, nor interacted with shadows.

In 3.1 the splat shows up in reflections, and reading and writing shadows in ray tracing mode. D5 additionally says it optimized the rendering pipeline for .ply scenes, reporting higher FPS in certain scenarios alongside reduced peak GPU usage and a lower probability of stuttering.

Treating splats as ray traceable primitives rather than a rasterized overlay follows a thread that runs directly out of recent research. NVIDIA's open sourcing of 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing (3DGRT) established the approach of intersecting rays against Gaussian primitives so that reflections, refraction, and secondary rays resolve correctly against a splat.

The second gaussian splatting update re-tools XR Tour, D5's feature that turns uploaded images or video into a browser viewable 3DGS reconstruction. AI-enhanced screenshots replace the traditional local rendering step, and D5 reports the same project now renders in roughly a quarter of the time it previously took. The training service, meanwhile, now outputs a .sog file. The XR Tour web editor has also been rebuilt on D5's custom WebGPU framework, adding custom camera transitions and iframe embed code generation for placing tours on web pages or third party platforms.

The full 3.1 release notes are available here.