Blender 5.3 adds initial support for 3D Gaussian splats

Blender 5.3 introduces initial support for 3D Gaussian splats, according to the Blender developers blog. The feature covers importing, editing and rendering captures made from sets of photos. Gsplats produce a radiance field of many small Gaussian blobs rather than a mesh. The developers say they will keep refining the implementation in upcoming releases.

Blender imports gsplats in the .PLY and .SPZ formats and can also load them from USDs. To import, drag a supported file into the viewport and confirm. The team published a demo file, dogwalk_assets_capture.ply, which captures the DOGWALK game assets at Blender HQ.

Internally, gsplats are a type of point cloud, and there is now a Pointcloud Type geometry node. Each splat uses position, a 3D scaling vector, a quaternion rotation and radiance. Radiance stores spherical harmonics for view-dependent lighting. In Geometry Nodes the data is split into radiance:base and radiance:sh, and color can also be set by writing to the radiance attribute. By default gsplats use an emissive material driven by radiance, which can be changed in the shader editor.

EEVEE and Workbench rasterize splats as camera-facing billboards. The initial EEVEE implementation uses the dithered transparency mode, which is noisy, so the post advises raising the sample count under Render > Sampling. In Workbench, set Viewport Shading > Lighting > Flat for the expected look. Cycles instead finds the intersection with maximum opacity along each ray and treats opacity as an acceptance probability. This supports reflections and indirect lighting, but results differ slightly from rasterized implementations. Splats in Cycles are ray-oriented, while most gsplat data is fitted with the EEVEE-style approach in mind.

Relighting is at an early stage. Both Cycles and EEVEE estimate a splat normal at the shading point, taking it as the direction of the smallest scale. Relighting currently uses the view-dependent radiance, and the developers say they may look into albedo extraction. Other listed work includes better EEVEE performance through GPU culling, since splats behind other splats are often drawn unnecessarily, and improved editing tools, as current ones are the same as for point clouds. The post links to a Blender 5.3 Beta download.