Esri Site Scan Adds Gaussian Splat Layer Creation for Aerial Photogrammetry

The gap between what a drone can capture and what a GIS platform can reconstruct has been narrowing for years, but vegetation, thin structures, and reflective surfaces stubbornly resisted traditional mesh pipelines. Esri has been no stranger to gaussian splatting, adding support into ArcGIS last year. Today, their Q2 2026 announcement update to Site Scan for ArcGIS continues that direction by adding Gaussian Splat Layer Creation to its cloud processing toolkit.

The new capability, expected later this quarter, will let Site Scan users generate Gaussian splat layers directly from their drone imagery alongside the orthomosaics, DSMs, and 3D meshes they already produce. Splats preserve photorealistic fine detail that meshes typically lose, making them particularly useful for stakeholder communication, vegetation analysis, and any context where visual fidelity matters.

This sits alongside a second headline feature in the Q2 release, Large Mission Processing, which raises the ceiling on how many images a single cloud job can handle without requiring users to manually split captures into smaller batches.

Currently gaussian splatting is available to Custom Subscription organizations hosted in the U.S. Site Scan region or India region. It is not available in the E.U. Site Scan region due to cloud infrastructure limitations. Additionally, publishing Gaussian splat layers to ArcGIS Enterprise or creating Sharelinks is not currently supported.

Learn more about the Site Scan update here.