It seems people were busy over Christmas. Out of Japan, Virtual Line Studios, in conjunction with the engineer Kenji Asaba, and Akiya Research Institute have released Vista Splat Pro for Unreal Engine 5.
https://twitter.com/KenjiASABA/status/1739482288600359197
You might recognize Akiya’s name, as they have been creating radiance field plugins for Unreal Engine 5 for a while now. They had started earlier this year with a NeRF plugin and have since developed one for Gaussian Splatting. While not yet confirmed, I am assuming the latter greatly helped, if not formed the foundation for Vista Splat Pro.
Vista Splat Pro supports real time dynamic shadows from other objects with Gaussian Splatting in Unreal Engine 5, making it a pretty handy tool for both gaming and virtual production. Additionally, it also supports having multiple Splats within the same scene.
The plugin, priced at 149.5K JPN or just over $1K, is by no means cheap. However, for some people and production companies, this might be a worthwhile investment. It appears that the plugin comes with the ability to use it commercially, as long as the user has paid for the plugin. As part of their roadmap, they’re planning to continue to develop out Vista Splat Pro and are also working on a library of assets to compliment the plugin. I have reached out to the Virtual Line Studio team to see if there is a free trial available.
As of right now, the plugin supports UE5.1, but not the current 5.3. The purchase link is neither the easiest to find nor is it the website the prettiest, but you can find it here.