The Blender ecosystem continues to grow around Gaussian Splatting, and a new tool has just entered the mix, Gauss Cannon. It’s an add-on built to simplify the often messy steps of generating camera paths and point clouds for reconstruction. Created and maintained by Arash Keshmirian, the plugin sits neatly inside Blender’s interface and brings a host of practical features for anyone working in Gaussian Splatting or NeRFs.

Instead of manually placing and animating cameras, you can use any mesh object as a template. The add-on automatically creates cameras at each face center, orients them opposite the face normals, and applies your chosen focal length and resolution. It even detects when a camera would end up inside geometry (using ray casting) and skips those automatically, with the benefit being time saved. 

Other capabilities include near-clipping protection, the ability to batch generate and export, and clear indicators in the UI. Currently exporting transforms are supported for both Postshot and the recently rising in popularity, Lichtfeld Studio, run by Janusch AKA, Mr.NeRF. 

Gauss Cannon also includes a ray-traced point cloud generator. Select your target mesh, enable GPU acceleration, and the add-on will create a color preserved PLY point cloud. It can sample across multiple frames, capture lighting and material information, and lets you adjust resolution anywhere between 8x8 and 1024x1024 raycasts per camera. Performance is still a work in progress, but I’ve always been willing to sacrifice speed for quality when it comes to reconstruction fidelity.

Like many other add-ons, it integrates into the N-panel with its own dedicated tab, so you don’t have to jump between editors. You can also preview camera coverage before committing to an export, which makes it easier to troubleshoot coverage gaps early.

Gauss Cannon requires Blender 4.2.0 or higher. Installation is the standard process: download the ZIP from GitHub releases, install it via Blender’s add-on preferences, and enable the checkbox. You may have to restart Blender, but from there, a new Gauss Cannon tab will appear in the viewport.

Just earlier today we took a look at the new KIRI Engine update to their Blender add-on. The barriers to entry for one of the most popular 3D engines in the world are continuing to rapidly fall. To learn more about Gauss Cannon, take a look at the GitHub page. It carries a GPL 3.0 license, making it commercially viable, in addition to being free to use.