SideFX Labs Ships Three Gaussian Splat Nodes for Relighting, Delighting, and Normal Reconstruction
Michael Rubloff
SideFX Labs has shipped its August update, which adds three gaussian splat nodes for relighting, delighting, and normal reconstruction. All three capabilities appeared in June as unnamed SideFX Labs prototypes in the Houdini 22 announcement, which delighted the splat, reconstructed surface information from normals, and applied new lighting through a Copernicus network. Houdini 22 shipped in July with those tools still labeled prototypes.
Relight GSplats is a LOP. It relights Gaussian splats using standard USD lights and physically based shading, and it supports image based lighting and optional shadows. The node can blend the relit result with the original captured appearance, which SideFX says better preserves reflective materials. As a LOP the operation sits on the USD stage and reads the light set already lighting the scene.
Delight GSplats is a SOP that estimates and removes the lighting baked into a capture to recover an approximate diffuse albedo. The algorithm adapts to splat size while preserving local detail and minimizing color bleeding.
Normals from GSplats is also a SOP addressing that splats do not normally include reliable normals. The node reconstructs an underlying surface and transfers the resulting normals back onto the splat points for downstream shading and processing.
Relighting splats inside Houdini started as a proof of concept built on GSOPs in October 2025, and GSOPs has been the third party route for most SOP level splat work in the host. Chaos added splat relighting to Houdini in V-Ray 7 update 4, which handles it in the renderer.
The same update adds a Copy Points SOP that copies packed primitives onto packed primitives in one node, a Delete Mismatched Attributes and Groups SOP, Rename Attributes and Select Node shelf tools, a Reload Python Modules widget, a Skeletal Mesh export mode in Labs Vertex Animation Texture 3.1, and SVG sticker support driven by a new STICKER_PATH environment variable.
SideFX Labs is free and releases on its own cadence outside the main Houdini cycle. It is available now.
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