Developer ZemingLi has released Splatypus 0.1.0, a free Grasshopper plugin that turns photos or video into a trained Gaussian splatting PLY inside Rhino 8.
The Rhino plugins for splats covered so far work with splats made elsewhere. Veesus added Rhino support for 3DGS in May 2025, RhinoGaussianSplatting arrived in July 2026 with import, editing, meshing and baking, and Krill 0.12.0 places splats as native Rhino blocks. Splatypus covers the step before import, producing the splat itself.
Splatypus chains FFmpeg for media import, COLMAP for camera reconstruction and Brush for training through a shared local project folder. Photo and video import reports frame count estimates. COLMAP runs either as an all-in-one reconstruction pipeline or as individual stages, with optional undistortion and alignment applied to one active dataset, and camera planes and sparse points can be inspected in Rhino between stages.
Brush dataset preparation feeds a background training job with progress, logs and cancellation, and the result exports as PLY. Splatypus previews an exported PLY as a colored point cloud. The listing states that this is a point cloud preview, not a Gaussian splat viewport renderer.
Splatypus requires Rhino 8.34 or newer running .NET 8, with Grasshopper. Windows x64 is the primary target, and a separate macOS package automates tool installation on Apple Silicon only. FFmpeg, COLMAP and Brush are not bundled. Each is downloaded on request as a pinned install or supplied through a manual path, and Brush requires a compatible GPU. An example definition, Examples/Splatypus_Workflow.gh, ships with setup notes.
Splatypus 0.1.0 is available now as a free download from food4rhino for Windows and macOS, listed under the MIT license.
