Tim Fennell has released Gaussian Splat Patch 0.2.0, which converts Blender meshes into gaussian splats with no training.
Gaussian Splat Patch launched as a Blender extension for erasing, clone stamping and healing splat scans, and v0.1.14 and v0.1.15 added Merge Splat Objects and Bake Edits. Until this release, every splat the add-on handled came from a capture.
Convert to Splats, in a new Mesh to Splats panel, lays out an even UV map on a copy of each selected mesh and bakes its materials in Cycles. Every covered texel becomes one flat splat lying in the surface, in a new object named after the mesh with a _splats suffix. Modifiers carry through, as do image, procedural, Generated and Object textures. The source mesh stays in the scene, hidden, and Convert Again refreshes the splat object after the mesh is edited.
Gaussian Splat Patch 0.2.0 offers three lighting modes. Light on Camera, the default, produces the color a scan would learn with its light fixed to the camera, which is what relighting in Spirula Render and Vintage Click reads. Fennell reports that, through Vintage Click's relight formula, the diffuse shading comes within about 10 percent of true Lambert shading. Bake Scene Lighting bakes the scene's lights and shadows into flat color, and those shadows stay put if the splats are relit.
Light from Scan places an asset inside a capture of a real place. Spirula Render renders six views of the surrounding scan from the object's center, Cycles lights the mesh with them as its World, and the scan's reflections go into the view dependent color. An optional Contact Shadows layer lays black splats on the scan where the object blocks its light, leaving the scan's own splats unchanged. The mode requires Fennell's Spirula Render engine.
Splat Spacing defaults to 1/400 of the object's size, and halving it makes four times as many splats. The SH Degree setting Match Scene uses the highest degree among the scans, since one PLY carries one degree, while Brightness and Shine set exposure and highlight strength. Converted objects merge with scans, and Export Splat PLY writes the result as one file.
The add-on requires Blender 5.3, which adds native splat import and rendering and is currently in beta. Gaussian Splat Patch 0.2.0 is available now under the GPL-3.0-or-later license.
