KIRI Engine Releases a Free MIT Licensed Gaussian Splat Renderer for After Effects
Michael Rubloff
KIRI Engine has released a free, MIT licensed gaussian splat renderer for Adobe After Effects.
Splat rendering inside After Effects has been a paid category since irrealix shipped its After Effects splat plugin in April 2024 at 49 USD, and Jawset's Postshot also carries an After Effects plugin. The LICENSE file reads MIT with a 2026 KIRI Innovations copyright, and the full C++ source sits beside the binary. The Gumroad listing is pay what you want at zero dollars or more, while GitHub Releases serves the identical package with no account and no email address.
The plugin supports many features to leverage splats in After Effects. Colour grading runs through a Color Gradient of up to 20 tabs and a Color Ramp, alongside an SH Degree control that sets how many spherical harmonic bands the renderer evaluates. Crop removes gaussians. Splat Scale resizes individual gaussians, Opacity sets a floor and a ceiling, and Density thins the cloud. Displacement offsets, scales and rotates gaussians away from their trained positions, each with its own ramp. Noise perturbs them with per axis strength and fractal controls for Octaves, Persistence and Lacunarity. Depth of Field carries Focus Distance, Aperture and Blur, computed in the plugin's own shader, and its Aperture values.
Nearly every one of those is shape scoped. Each carries a falloff volume with its own size, scale on three axes, center and feather, so an effect can be confined to a region of the scene instead of applied across the whole cloud, and most take a ramp that varies the result through that volume. Crop and Noise take the shape without the ramp.
The importer registers exactly one extension, ply. Spherical harmonics are read to full degree 3.
Kiri's other plugin, 3DGS Render for Blender, now at v5.0.0, turns each splat into a polygon face that must be re-oriented to the current view in Legacy Edit mode, which KIRI's own documentation calls very performance heavy, and it gates deform, scale and SH settings behind a bake.
The After Effects plugin rasterizes through the comp camera. Nearly every creative control, across the Crop, Splat Scale, Noise, Opacity, Displacement and Density groups, is shape scoped, taking a falloff volume with size, scale, center and feather, and most also take a ramp.
New to Gaussian Splatting? Start here
