Iconem has released blender_ogc3dtiles v0.5.1, a free Blender add-on that streams OGC 3D Tiles, including gaussian splatting tilesets, into the viewport.
The add-on is written by Iconem CTO Jonathan Chemla, and tiles load and unload around the viewport camera, or around the render camera for animations. Version 0.3.0, tagged October 22 on Chemla's own repository, did not read splat tiles. Splat support first shipped in v0.4.0 on November 4, and v0.5.0 and v0.5.1 followed the same day.
Splat tiles must carry the KHR_gaussian_splatting glTF extension, either SPZ-compressed or uncompressed, as written by Iconem's 3dtiled, the Cesium tilers and the 3DGS-PLY-3DTiles converter. Cesium added KHR_gaussian_splatting support to CesiumJS and Unreal Engine earlier this year. In blender_ogc3dtiles, splat tiles stream through the cesium-native backend, an optional wheel installed from the add-on preferences, which decodes the SPZ payload and carries position, color, opacity, rotation, scale and spherical harmonic coefficients into each tile.
On the Blender 5.3 beta, a shared OGC3D Splats Geometry Nodes group turns each tile into a native gaussian splat point cloud rendered by Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles. Attribute conventions follow Blender's own SPZ importer. Blender 5.3 adds native splat import and rendering and is still in beta, with blender.org listing the release as expected November 10. On earlier Blender versions the same tiles display as colored points.
Level of detail, scene origin, clipping with Blender objects and a converged animation render, which waits for each frame's tiles to finish loading, apply to splat tiles as they do to meshes and point clouds. Raster overlays do not apply to splats. Blender sorts splats per object, so the blend order between a parent tile and its children is briefly undefined during a REPLACE transition.
Sources include Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, Cesium ion assets, and local or network tilesets. The add-on runs on Blender 4.2 and newer, and v0.5.1 is tested on 4.5 LTS, 5.1, 5.2 LTS and the 5.3 beta. Splat streaming formats such as stream-SOG, RAD and LCC are not read directly and need a converter that serves them as 3D Tiles.
blender_ogc3dtiles v0.5.1 is available now under the MIT license.
