CG Nomads has pushed out GSOPs 2.8, the latest update to their Houdini toolkit for Gaussian Splatting. Following on the heels of v2.7’s new nodes and 2DGS support, this release adds deeper controls for artists, more flexible rendering modes, and support for compressed 3DGS file formats.

At the center of the update is a new Histogram node, complete with an example scene, that allows users to better analyze and refine their splat data inside Houdini. Building on the Gaussian Splats Enhance node introduced in v2.7, version 2.8 now includes roughness approximation, giving splats additional surface detail and realism. Relighting workflows have also been upgraded, with the IBL relighting system now supporting both ambient occlusion and roughness attributes for more accurate lighting behavior.

For interactive work, GSOPs 2.8 introduces new viewport render modes, including “live compositing”, “depth”, and “world position” giving artists faster feedback when adjusting splats. Two new controls are now exposed as well: the maximum spherical harmonics order and the maximum splat count, providing finer control over quality and performance tradeoffs.

Another key addition is support for compressed .splat and .spz formats, accompanied by an example scene that demonstrates their use. Having support for these two formats is super nice, as both allow for radically reducing file size, without sacrificing fidelity. Hopefully this will also pave the way for SOG compression support in the future.

The release also includes a high quality example featuring a new asset from Zoltan Pogonyi, along with a series of bug fixes. These include a fix for a rare issue when downloading example data and a correction for misaligned splats and point clouds when camera film offsets were applied. Updated precompiled binaries ensure smooth installation on both Windows and MacOS.

GSOPs remains with a AGPL-3.0 license. You can explore the new features and download GSOPs 2.8 here.