Unity Gaussian Splatting

Unity Gaussian Splatting is a free, MIT licensed package that imports, edits and renders 3D Gaussian splats inside Unity. Programmer Aras Pranckevičius created it in 2023, and it ships from the aras-p/UnityGaussianSplatting repository on GitHub as the Unity package org.nesnausk.gaussian-splatting. It renders captures in the Unity editor and in built players.

The importer reads PLY files in the layout of the original 3D Gaussian Splatting paper and Scaniverse SPZ files, and an editor tool converts them into compressed GaussianSplat assets. Version 0.8.0 reorganised the project into the org.nesnausk.gaussian-splatting package with sample projects for the Built-in, URP and HDRP render pipelines, and since version 1.1.0 URP support has required Unity 6 or later. Aras develops on Unity 2022.3 and states that other versions might also work. Splats are not lit by scene lights and do not write to the depth buffer.

The package runs only on graphics APIs that support its compute work, which means D3D12, Metal or Vulkan. DX11 does not work on Windows, OpenGL and OpenGL ES are not supported, and mobile and web builds are untested and probably do not work. On the 6.1 million splat bicycle scene at 1200 by 797, the README reports 6.8 ms a frame under DX12 or Vulkan on an RTX 3080 Ti against 7.4 ms for the official reference viewer, and 21.5 ms under Metal on an Apple M1 Max. Sorting and caching need about 48 bytes of GPU memory per splat.

Editing happens in the Unity inspector and scene view. Rectangle selection can subtract from a selection, and cutouts can be inverted to remove the splats inside their volume rather than keep them. An early 2024 update moved the splat tools into a Unity editor tool context, added moving individual splats, merging several splat objects into one and a Reset button, and let PLY export bake an object's whole transform, rotating the spherical harmonics with it. The same update replaced the GPU sort with an 8 bit reduce then scan radix sort, cutting the sort of 6.1 million splats on an RTX 3080 Ti from 2.4 ms to 1.1 ms.

Aras added a README note in December 2023 that he is not planning significant further development, and the package has since moved forward largely on outside contributions under its MIT licence. A community pull request added VR support in late 2024, tested on HTC Vive, Varjo Aero, Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro, with Apple Vision Pro reported as not working, and its merge prompted the 1.0 release. Version 1.1.2 in October 2026, the first release since v1.1.1 in April 2025, fixes orthographic cameras, loads PLY and SPZ files with lower order spherical harmonics, and fixes a crash on PLY files whose expanded splat data passes 2GB. Its SPZ reader still accepts only version 2 files, so SPZ 4.0 containers do not load.