Pilot Studio has released SplatPilot 3.0.1, a Blender 5.3 extension that turns an object, a collection or a whole scene into a Gaussian splat.
SplatPilot went on sale on Superhive on November 10, the day Blender 5.3 shipped with native Gaussian splat support, and its output is a native Blender 5.3 splat object that renders in EEVEE and Cycles. Synthetic splats from Blender scenes already had two other routes, as Splatlight trains from automatically placed camera rigs without a COLMAP solve and SplatGen trains and relights splats inside the Blender 5.3 alpha.
SplatPilot 3.0.1 runs in four steps, Cameras, Render, Train and Splat, and skips any step already completed for the current settings. A Kind setting of Object places cameras all around the subject, including from below, while Indoor and Outdoor place them along the surfaces so every surface renders at the same detail. Before the full render, a coverage map in the viewport grades each spot Good, Fair, Weak or Unseen.
Rendering runs with Cycles or EEVEE in a second Blender from a copy of the file, so the open scene stays untouched. Training runs on the GPU through Vulkan with an engine written for SplatPilot, and Indoor and Outdoor runs also train on small depth images from Geometry Cameras to reduce holes and floaters. Draft, Standard and High presets set camera count, image size, splat budget and training steps, Improve… trains a finished splat further, and a checkpoint is saved every 5 minutes.
Pilot Studio reports that Blender's Classroom scene on an RTX 4070 with Cycles reaches 35.5 dB PSNR on 40 held out views at the Standard preset, with 1 million splats in about 19 minutes. Export covers PLY, SOG and SPZ with the color look baked in, and the rendered images export as COLMAP or nerfstudio datasets for Postshot, LichtFeld Studio, OpenSplat and other trainers.
SplatPilot needs Blender 5.3 or newer on 64 bit Windows or Linux, with no macOS build, and a Vulkan GPU with about 1 GB of VRAM at Standard or 3 GB at High. It needs no account or license server and is licensed GPL-3.0-or-later, with the full source in the download.
SplatPilot 3.0.1 is available now on Superhive for $19, or $42 for up to five seats.
