PCD Splatter Turns E57 Laser Scans Into Gaussian Splats Inside Blender

Punto de Ancla Studio has released Point Cloud Density Splatter, a Blender add-on that turns laser scanned point clouds into renderable gaussian splat objects.

Nothing in PCD Splatter is trained. No images enter the process and no optimization runs against photographs. Blender opened an official design task for native gaussian splat import and rendering in June, and until that ships splats reach the Blender viewport through add-ons. Olli Huttunen's Point Cloud Merger prepares COLMAP reconstructions for an external trainer.

Every splat is sized from the measured distance to its neighbors instead of a global slider, so splats grow to seal gaps where the scan is sparse and shrink to hold detail where it is dense. Punto de Ancla states the multi-scale kNN behind that measurement sits within 0.28% mean error of brute force.

The same analysis that estimates normals finds each surface's dominant direction, and on beams, pipes, cables and handrails the listing reports an oriented ellipse covering about 2.6 times the area of a disc of the same thickness.

PCD Splatter implements the ASTM E2807 E57 standard itself in pure Python, covering the page layer, CRC, XML section and bit-packed CompressedVector streams, with no compiled dependencies. Multi-scan E57 files keep their per-scan pose. Reading runs in blocks with decimation applied during the read, so a multi-gigabyte file never has to fit in RAM. Format support covers e57, ply, pts, xyz, asc, txt, and csv.

These become Blender objects that render in Eevee and Cycles and takes depth of field, motion blur and every render pass. Splat shape is surfel, billboard or round, and six display modes cover color, intensity, normals, height, depth and a custom gradient.

Five culling stages chain cheapest first, point budget, section plane, frustum, backface, and a geometry mask, none of which delete points. The section plane is an Empty that can be moved and rotated to cut live into a scan of a crusher, a silo or a conveyor gallery.

Punto de Ancla puts memory at roughly 64 bytes per point in the mesh plus about as much again from Blender, giving about 380 MB at 3M points and 2.5 GB at 20M. Autodesk ReCap rcs and rcp files are not readable, which the listing attributes to the format carrying no public specification.

Export writes standard 3DGS ply for SuperSplat, PlayCanvas and splat-transform. PCD Splatter runs on Blender 4.2 through 5.1 across Windows, macOS and Linux, updates itself through Blender's extension repository against a published SHA-256 hash, and costs $70 with GPL-3.0 source included.

It is available now on Superhive.