When Foundry first previewed Gaussian Splatting in the Nuke 17 beta, it signaled that radiance fields were no longer living at the periphery of high end compositing. Now, with the official release of Nuke 17.0, that signal becomes permanent. Gaussian Splats are no longer experimental add-ons or pipeline detours. They are part of the core 3D system.
For the entertainment industry at large, this means splats can now be ingested, manipulated, masked, merged, and rendered entirely inside the Node Graph, without round tripping through external tools or game engines.
Nuke 17.0 supports both .ply and .splat formats directly through the GeoImport and GeoReference nodes. The process feels consistent with traditional 3D scene import of selecting the file, configuring payload and visibility settings in the Scene Graph dialog, and bringing the splat into your comp as part of the new 3D system. Once loaded, the Hydra GPU-based viewer displays the radiance field interactively in 3D mode.
Gaussian Splats inside Nuke are no longer static reconstructions. Through the Field node framework, artists can create volumetric masks that define where splats live, where they disappear, and how they blend. FieldShape can carve out geometric regions. GeoDeletePoints can non-destructively remove portions of a splat based on those fields, even inverting masks to keep only selected regions. GeoGrade brings familiar color correction controls into the 3D point domain, allowing compositors to rebalance or clean up areas directly within the radiance field. Multiple splats can be combined with GeoMerge, enabling composited environments assembled entirely from captured volumes.
Rendering closes the loop. The new SplatRender node converts the radiance field into 2D pixels while also generating depth and deep outputs. Motion blur and color space controls are handled inside the node, and the result flows naturally into standard compositing operations. Once rendered, splats can be merged with plates, backgrounds, and CG using familiar Read and Merge nodes, with depth or deep data enabling proper integration.
Gaussian Splatting, as a radiance field method, reconstructs photorealistic 3D scenes from standard camera imagery by representing surfaces as millions of anisotropic Gaussian primitives rather than traditional meshes. It has advanced quickly in real-time engines and research environments.
When a tool as entrenched in film and episodic VFX as Nuke embeds splats directly into its 3D system, it signals that radiance fields are becoming infrastructure. The team at Foundry also released a very helpful video tutorial on getting up and running.
And for the first time, compositors can treat them that way. Learn more about the 17.0 here.
