Preferred Networks (PFN) has brought 3D Gaussian Splatting into Japanese primetime television. The company's production pipeline, built around 3DGS and a proprietary Unreal Engine plugin, is being used on TBS's GIFT, the latest entry in the long running Sunday Theater drama block, which premiered April 12, 2026.
Sunday Theater is TBS's flagship 9 PM Sunday drama slot, a 60-year-old institution the network reserves for high-budget productions expected to draw large audiences. GIFT stars Shinichi Tsutsumi as a genius astrophysicist who becomes entangled with a struggling wheelchair rugby team, a premise that, as it turns out, created exactly the production conditions where Gaussian splatting has a real advantage.
GIFT's central sport is wheelchair rugby, and the series calls for intense, high-speed gameplay scenes in a gymnasium setting. Shooting that material on location, with cast safety, camera access, and scheduling all in play, is difficult. Building the same environment as full scratch 3DCG is cost and time intensive, particularly on a broadcast TV schedule.
PFN and TBS decided to take a more efficient path. They captured the real gymnasium as a set of multi view photographs using a standard DSLR, then reconstructed it as a 3D Gaussian Splat. That reconstruction became the virtual backdrop the production could film against in studio, with the cast performing the rugby sequences on a controlled set.
According to PFN, the pipeline supports two on set workflows. The first is a greenscreen setup in which the 3DGS reconstruction is composited against the live action plate in real time, synced to the physical camera's movement so the DP can see the final framing on a preview monitor while shooting and adjust camera work accordingly. The second is in-camera VFX on an LED volume, where the same reconstruction is projected onto a large LED screen behind the performers so that background and foreground are captured simultaneously.
Both workflows run through a PFN developed Unreal Engine plugin that is not publicly available, and on set implementation was led by TBS Act, the TBS Group's production company.
A conventional CG gymnasium would require modeling, texturing, and lighting passes sized for close camera work, a significant undertaking on a weekly drama schedule that wouldn’t be feasible. Conventional photogrammetry can cut that down, but point cloud and polygon mesh reconstructions often don't hold up under the scrutiny.
3D Gaussian Splatting sits in a useful middle ground with the high fidelity reconstruction from photographs alone, fast enough to produce within a broadcast timeline, and renderable in real time with free camera movement. For a sequence built around kinetic sports choreography, where the camera needs to follow players through a space rather than sit on a locked off plate, that free camera work is the whole point.
The GIFT deployment is part of a broader push PFN and TBS Holdings have been making since announcing a capital and business alliance in April 2025, with the stated goal of using emerging technology, like gaussian splatting it to expand what's possible in Japanese video production. PFN has signaled plans to apply the same pipeline across film, drama, games, advertising, and simulation environments.
For the radiance fields community, it's another data point in a line that now includes Amazon Prime's dynamic splat replays, Framestore's production work, and a growing list of capture to broadcast pipelines. GIFT adds a practical answer to a scheduling and budget problem on a flagship weekly drama.
GIFT airs Sundays at 9 PM on TBS.
