Hi Everyone!
Inside two weeks, Three.js merged a native Gaussian splat renderer for r186 and vis.gl shipped a GPU splat renderer in luma.gl 9.4.0 beta. Meanwhile Foundry shipped a Gaussian splat toolset in Nuke 17.1v1, Maya got splat snapping, Houdini got three more splat tools, PlayCanvas turned SuperSplat into a publishing endpoint, and in the last week of the month, four free Blender add-ons and a free Houdini tool landed in five days.
Forty-nine articles, seventy-seven job listings, and one hundred and three research papers on radiancefields.com. That’s more than double July on every single axis. Let’s get into it. This the first issue where the full issue will be a paid offering.
The Web Went Native — Twice
This is the story of the month, and it took two events fourteen days apart to become one.
On August 10, Three.js merged a native Gaussian splat renderer bound for r186 — a WebGPU/TSL implementation with a GPU counting sort and loaders for PLY, SPLAT, SPZ, KSPLAT and glTF. Three.js is the default 3D library on the web. Until now, every splat on a Three.js page arrived through third-party code, World Labs’ Spark, GaussianSplats3D, and most of the ecosystem’s viewers are built on those. Native support changes the maintenance story for a very large number of projects at once.
It was written by Ben Houston (Threekit, Land of Assets) and merged by Mugen87, and the striking thing is how small it is: 7KB on top of base Three.js for the SPZ loader and renderer, and three lines of code to put a splat on screen. Depth ordering lives in a reusable CountingSort that quantizes splat depth into bins and dispatches four TSL compute passes, re-sorting only when the camera moves past a threshold.
Then on August 24, vis.gl published @luma.gl/splats as a 9.4.0 beta — a GPU-native splat renderer with WebGPU hierarchy traversal, bounded residency and Spark RAD paging. vis.gl is the deck.gl stack, which means this is simultaneously a web-graphics item and a geospatial one.
And a week and a half after Three.js merged, the browser learned to do the other half of the job. Arrival.Space published Splat.js, an MIT-licensed WebGPU library that runs SIFT SfM and 3D Gaussian splat training in a browser tab. Tldr is that you can process the full gaussian splatting pipeline right in the browser.
Gaussian Splatting on YouTube
I spoke to Oscar nominated VFX Supervisor Guido Wolter from Rising Sun Pictures about how Sinners utilized radiance fields in the film.
If you haven’t yet, please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel.
