A developer working under the GitHub handle ElHamb1 has published Gaussian Ray Tracing for HDRP, an experimental Unity package that ray traces 3D Gaussian splats and triangle meshes in the same scene.
The package, com.markus.gaussian-raytracing 0.1.0, is a fork of the UnityGaussianSplatting plugin that Aras Pranckevičius created in 2023, and it also draws on roth-hex-lab's multi-layer anatomy renderer. It replaces org.nesnausk.gaussian-splatting outright, so the two cannot be installed together. The ray tracing adaptations are credited to NVIDIA's vk_gaussian_splatting sample, which follows NVIDIA's 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing work. The README calls the package an independent adaptation and "not a claim of parity" with NVIDIA's current application.
Gaussian Ray Tracing for HDRP traces its own acceleration structure holding the splats and any registered meshes. A mesh given the 3DGRT Transmission material can act as glass that the splats are seen through, or as an opaque receiver that catches shadows, and the renderer supports up to eight directional, point or spot lights. Ordinary HDRP Lit objects do not automatically take part in its reflection, transmission or shadow rays.
Each gaussian can also carry an optional uint32 class ID. Labels are baked inside Unity from collider geometry aligned to the splats, or imported from an external segmentation workflow, and a Semantic Alpha filter and a CutoutView component with cylinder or ellipsoid volumes fade or isolate chosen classes. The package does not train splats or segment them automatically.
The importer accepts binary little endian PLY with float32 properties, including Scaniverse field ordering and spherical harmonics up to degree 3. The target configuration is Unity 6000.3.12f1 and HDRP 17.3.0 on Windows x64 with Direct3D 12 and a hardware ray tracing GPU.
The ray path requires a mono Game camera at full resolution with TAA and MSAA off, and output is composited after post processing. XR, URP, mobile, WebGL and macOS ray tracing are not supported, and the README lists clean project rendering and standalone player validation as pending.
Gaussian Ray Tracing for HDRP is available now on GitHub under MIT and Apache-2.0 licenses.
