KIRI Engine is back with the release of their free Blender plugin and its adding rigging for 3DGS. It transfers animation from a proxy mesh onto target splats, opening Mixamo animations and mocap data to splat captures, an experimental feature the team says currently works best on smaller scans rather than full scene captures, but one that puts character style animation of real captures inside a standard Blender workflow for the first time in this add-on’s history.
Additionally their team is experimenting with light baking for splats. The take lighting information from a proxy mesh and the surrounding Blender scene is used to modify splat colors, approximating baked illumination on 3DGS content.
The most production ready addition is 4DGS support via .ply sequence export. Splats animated or manipulated with Geometry Nodes can now be written out as a frame sequence and played back in viewers such as SuperSplat, turning Blender’s procedural toolset into a 4DGS authoring environment with a clean handoff to web playback.
Version 5.0 also restores compatibility with Blender 5.1, which had broken the add-on badly enough that a community fork briefly circulated to patch the Python issue. KIRI says the release closes over one hundred reported issues, alongside a long tail of quality of life work. For instance, exposed SH degree and camera threshold settings in Render mode for lower spec systems, camera frustum and distance culling, compositor setups that survive and restore after renders, a temp file cleanup button, a Remove SH function to strip higher spherical harmonic attributes, Edit mode selection by splat size or bounding objects, a UV Edit modifier for image textures and stylized work, and conversion between vert and face based 3DGS meshes.
The add-on has compounded steadily through this site’s coverage. The original release, the 2.0 performance rebuild, 3.0’s mesh to splat conversion, 4.0’s dedicated Render mode, and 4.1’s crop and SH tooling. With Blender’s own native gsplat IO still at the design task stage, KIRI’s add-on remains the most complete splat workflow inside the application.
3DGS Render remains free, with downloads on Superhive and GitHub.
