The GSOPs project continues its steady evolution with the release of GSOPs 2.9. While previous releases focused on expanding creative tooling and viewport fidelity, this update shifts towards interoperability, data transparency, and long term pipeline alignment, particularly with the arrival of Houdini 21.
The most important change in GSOPs 2.9 is official support for Houdini 21, which also now ships with its own native Gaussian splatting representations. Rather than competing with those developments, GSOPs positions itself as a bridge. However, what I am most excited about is a fix for transparent splats. GSOPs developer David Rhodes detailed how to do this, here.
A new Gaussian Splats Convert SOP allows artists to move splat data between GSOPs’ internal conventions and Houdini 21’s native attribute layouts. In practice, this means splats can now travel more freely between GSOPs tools, Houdini’s broader SOP context, and downstream USD centric workflows without requiring destructive conversions or custom scripts.
This release effectively reframes GSOPs from a standalone splatting toolkit into a complementary layer that extends Houdini’s native capabilities. GSOPs 2.9 also leans into a recurring theme across recent releases to give artists better visibility into what their splat data actually contains.
A new Histogram SOP, accompanied by example scenes, exposes attribute distributions directly inside Houdini. As Gaussian splatting assets grow in size and complexity, this level of introspection is important, particularly as productions pivot into gaussian splatting.
Building on the groundwork laid in GSOPs 2.8, the new release continues refining how splats behave in the viewport and under lighting:
Expanded viewport render modes, including depth and world position views
Improved roughness and image based lighting responses
Controls for spherical harmonics order and maximum splat counts, enabling more deliberate quality-versus-performance tradeoffs
Support for compressed formats such as .splat and .spz remains a key part of the pipeline story, allowing artists to work with larger datasets while keeping disk usage and iteration times manageable. Time will have to tell if .sog support is also added.
As radiance fields continue to move from research into real production environments, I would expect several large scale productions to continue to use GSOPs and Houdini. GSOPs 2.9 is available now on GitHub.
