Back in January, OTOY surprised many with the announcement that Octane Render 2026.1 Alpha would include early support for Gaussian Splatting, marking one of the first commercial render engines to do so. Ten months later, that experiment has evolved. The 2026.1 Beta is here, and Octane’s Radiance Field integration is starting to look far more production ready.
Octane now supports loading and exporting the SPZ compressed format, the same format popularized by Niantic's Scaniverse. This means artists can move data more fluidly between Octane and external reconstruction or visualization tools without the need to manually decompress .ply files.
In addition, Gaussian Splat clipping has arrived. Users can now define clipping primitives or apply clipping materials to limit visible points within a scene, hugely useful when working with dense captures or large outdoor scans. Also, enabling Wireframe mode now also reveals the bounds of the clipping primitive, making it easier to visualize what’s being trimmed.
And perhaps most notably for the Mac community, Gaussian Splatting now runs natively on macOS, further expanding the reach of this representation beyond Windows and Linux.
While still officially “experimental,” this Beta release pushes Octane’s Radiance Field capabilities closer to practical use. The ability to clip, export, and compress splats directly aligns with how many in the Gaussian Splatting ecosystem are already working, particularly those moving between capture, reconstruction, and render tools like RealityScan and Nuke.
It also reinforces OTOY’s ambition to unify Radiance Field methods with physically based rendering. Because Octane’s implementation remains ray-traced rather than rasterized, Gaussian Splats retain their ability to cast shadows, contribute to reflections, and integrate naturally with other geometry.
Even with these improvements, this remains a Beta. OTOY notes that optimizations are ongoing and that performance is not yet fully indicative of the final release. Scenes created in this build may not be forward compatible, and some of the Alpha era constraints, like splats rendering over volumes, still apply. But expect many of these to be smoothed out as the final production release approaches.
It’s worth remembering that Octane’s splat support isn’t happening in isolation. Over 2024, Gaussian Splatting quietly became a shared language across major 3D tools—from Houdini to DaVinci Resolve to Unreal Engine. OTOY's continued investment through Beta 1 signals that this is not a passing experiment but a foundational addition to its renderer.
Octane Render 2026.1 Beta 1 is now available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, including full support for Apple M series devices (macOS 14.5 and up). Studio+ subscribers can download it today through OTOY’s portal.
