Epic Games has listed experimental Gaussian splat import on the roadmap for the Unreal Engine 5.9 MegaJam Preview, released on November 9.
The roadmap card, filed under Design & Compose Worlds, covers importing splats authored in other applications as PLY or SPZ data and adding them to the world. Niagara integration allows the splats to be manipulated creatively, and Epic describes Gaussian Splats (Experimental) as an efficient option for displaying photorealistic 3D content in a scene.
Experimental splat import reached Fortnite creators first, when UEFN 43.00 added experimental Gaussian splat import with PLY and SPZ files placed from the Content Browser. Unreal Engine 5 projects have relied on third party plugins for splats since Luma AI released its Unreal Engine plugin in 2023, with NanoGS and StarLightGS among the more recent options.
Syuya Mukai reported on X that the importer sits behind a Gaussian Splat plugin that has to be enabled, after which PLY and SPZ files can be dragged straight into the Content Browser. Mukai also reported that large files can crash on import, and that lowering SH Max Degree to a small value such as 1 lets them load.
The roadmap card gives no figures for splat counts, file sizes or supported SPZ versions, and the Preview announcement does not mention splats.
Epic calls the 5.9 MegaJam Preview the first Unreal Engine release built primarily with agentic workflows. The build had about a week of development and a shorter QA pass than usual, Epic recommends testing on a copy of a project, and the full 5.9 release is planned for next year.
The Unreal Engine 5.9 MegaJam Preview is available now from the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub and as a Linux build, and the experimental splat import is featured on the Gaussian Splats roadmap card.
