Krill

Krill is a Rhino 8 plugin from Verkare AB, a Gothenburg studio, written by the architect Benjamin and announced publicly on 2 September 2026. It brings 3D gaussian splat scans into Rhino as native block instances, positioning itself for architects who want to draw and model inside a sampled space rather than beside a reference image. Version 0.12.0 is the current closed beta release.

What lands in the Rhino document is a block instance that Krill owns, not a mesh, a Brep or a SubD. The splats themselves are drawn by Krill's own GPU pipeline, which composites into the Rhino viewport from a display conduit with per-pixel depth, so solids occlude the scan and transparent objects tint it. Because the scan is a block instance it inherits the tools already in the file, layers, hide and isolate, undo, copy and array, and it is reachable from Grasshopper. It draws in every viewport and survives into screen captures and prints.

Large scans build a level of detail pyramid on first import. Verkare's own demo holds about a hundred buildings at roughly six million splats each, some 600 million splats in total, on a single GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 16 GB. That figure is a vendor demonstration rather than an independent benchmark. Both AMD and NVIDIA cards are tested, Intel graphics are untested, and very large scans placed many times can exhaust 8 GB of graphics memory.

The editing surface is the part that separates Krill from a viewer. Cut and crop volumes trim a scan live against Rhino geometry, native clipping planes work, and trimming is clipped per splat rather than per tile. Point osnap snaps the cursor to splat centres, so measurements are taken on the scan itself. Inside a block edit, stray splats, passers-by and capture noise can be deleted non-destructively, with deletions that undo, survive save and reopen, and can be restored at any time or excluded from a .ply export. Colour grading covering hue, saturation and brightness applies per placement, per block or globally with live preview. A relightable splat mode that exchanges shadows with Rhino geometry ships off by default behind the KrillExperimental command.

Version 0.12.0 added a splat size filter inside block edit, a range slider over the block's size distribution that can restrict a selection or live-preview a deletion and commit it as one undoable step. It also fixed per-viewport visibility for block-local cut and crop volumes including layout details, stopped splats painting over a whole layout sheet, added a Duplicate definition command to the block context menu, made double-clicking a Krill block enter block edit directly, and fixed the load-time failure that stopped the plugin loading in Rhino 9 BETA.

Everything runs locally. Verkare states that nothing is uploaded and nothing is tracked, and there is no external renderer, hosted platform or subscription in the loop. The package is published to the Rhino Package Manager but locked behind an access code for the duration of the closed beta, issued on request by email, and no price has been published.