Lutra Consulting and North Road are crowdfunding €85,000 to bring gaussian splats into the 2D and 3D map views of QGIS.
QGIS already reads 3D Tiles and Esri's I3S scene layers through tiled scene layers, which the two companies introduced in 2023, but both paths display only triangular meshes today. The proposed work would add parsing of splat data encoded as 3D Tiles, plus rendering for both map views, built on the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension that Cesium, Esri and others developed toward a standard. Cesium shipped KHR_gaussian_splatting support in CesiumJS 1.139 and Cesium for Unreal v2.23.0 in March.
In a test capture, a DJI Mini 5 Pro flew a small site and took 112 photos, COLMAP and Brush trained the scene, and SuperSplat cropped it to a result of nearly 3 million splats.
The same campaign funds automated atmosphere effects following Sébastien Hillaire's 2020 approach, with sky lighting that follows the time of day and distant objects that fade with atmospheric scattering. Scene presets would set up a new 3D map in either a CAD/BIM style or a Realistic style.
A new keyframe animation system would cover both 2D and 3D maps, with orbit and 360 degree pan templates and native video export, replacing the current practice of stitching exported frames in another application. The identify tool would gain point and line support in 3D views, and PlayStation DualSense, Xbox and other gamepads would navigate 3D scenes.
This is the sixth QGIS 3D crowdfunding campaign from Lutra Consulting and North Road. Work starts only if the target is reached, and the companies aim to deliver the features across QGIS 4.6, 4.8 and 4.10 in 2027. Pledges start at €200 and become binding only if the target is met, and €500 had been pledged at the time of writing.
The campaign runs until December 7.
