In the newest Nuke 17.0 open beta, Foundry is rolling out full native support for Gaussian Splats, marking another major film industry platform bringing splats to be a first class citizen. Earlier in the year, developer Irrealix had added gaussian splatting support for Nuke, but now we are seeing the direct addition from Foundry.
It’s an exciting milestone that could reshape how environment work, set extensions, and plate plus 3D integration happen in real productions.
Nuke can now read both .ply and .splat files using the revamped GeoImport node, with GeoReference offering the same familiar anchoring and alignment behavior artists rely on for photogrammetry, lidar, and traditional geometry. Once inside the scene, the GPU accelerated Hydra viewer picks up the heavy lifting, displaying and rendering the splats natively so they behave like any other 3D element in the composite.
Foundry has introduced a dedicated subset of Field nodes aimed at non destructive masking workflows—FieldConstant, FieldCrop, FieldRamp, FieldImage, signed distance field shapes, field math, blending, inverting, modifying shapes, and transforming them.
On top of field driven masking, Nuke now exposes color correction and point level manipulation for splats. GeoGrade helps color correct splats and includes masking support, while GeoDeletePoints introduces a clean, non destructive way to remove unwanted splats.
The pipeline closes with SplatRender, a new node that turns a radiance field into full 2D pixels, complete with motion blur and depth outputs. Instead of baking splats into other renderers or relying on screen space hacks, compositors can now generate images and mattes directly from the splat itself and blend them into traditional plates or CG renders.
There’s an inevitability to this kind of update. Gaussian Splatting has been advancing so quickly on the capture, reconstruction, and real time side of the world that it was only a matter of time before high end compositing tools acknowledged it as a production ready asset type. With Nuke’s new open beta, even more entertainment professionals can incorporate splats into their workflows.
More to come still!
