SideFX has shipped Houdini 22, making its native Gaussian Splat pipeline generally available in a stable, production build of the DCC. The toolset itself arrived with the version's launch and keynote. The feature set SideFX bills as production ready Gaussian Splats moves out of preview and into a release studios can install and begin using.
The native pipeline trains 3DGS through PDG/TOPs so an optimization can be partitioned and parallelized across a farm the way a simulation or render wedge would be, with procedural nodes handling cleanup of the resulting splat set. It adds Copernicus rasterization nodes that turn a splat cloud into color and depth for compositing against conventional CG, and it lets splats deform and rig through the existing Bone Deform and Surface Deform SOPs. It also reconstructs Karma rendered imagery back into 3DGS, closing a synthetic to splat loop, and ships a SideFX Labs prototype for spherical-harmonic / normal-based relighting. One note is that SfM is currently not handled within Houdini, so initial alignment will have to occur elsewhere.
Native Gaussian splatting now lives inside a shipping build of a major DCC, alongside the same SOP, TOP, and compositing contexts a studio already runs. With H22 generally available, training, cleanup, deform, compositing, and reconstruction are all first-party and installable in one build. It is available now.
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