Blender

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite maintained by the Blender Foundation in Amsterdam and released under the GPL. It covers modelling, sculpting, animation, simulation, compositing and rendering in a single application, and ships for Windows, macOS and Linux with no paid tier and no per seat licence.

Gaussian splat work in Blender ran entirely through third party add-ons until recently. KIRI Engine ships a free Blender renderer, now at 3DGS Render 5.0, Nerfstudio maintains its own exporter add-on, SkySplat targets drone capture, and Splatlight imports splats as scene objects with EEVEE and Cycles relighting. Gauss Cannon works in the other direction, turning a Blender scene into training data by placing cameras on a template mesh and exporting renders, a COLMAP sparse model and a point cloud for a separate trainer.

The Blender Foundation opened an official design task for native import and rendering rather than leaving the capability to add-ons. Blender 5.3 is the result. It imports PLY and SPZ v4 splat files and renders them in Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles, and it adds three geometry nodes, Set Point Cloud Type, Import SPZ and Import PLY, which put splat loading inside the node graph. There is no export path in this release, so splats leave Blender only through the add-on ecosystem. Blender 5.3 is in beta as of October 2026 and has not yet had a stable release.

Native rendering across all three engines is the part that matters for production. A splat loaded into Cycles receives scene lighting and sits in the same depth order as conventional geometry, which removes the compositing step that add-on based workflows required. Blender publishes a minimum of a 2 GB VRAM GPU with OpenGL 4.3, and dense splat scenes will need considerably more than that floor.