Gaussian Splatting

Renzora renders 3D Gaussian splats — photorealistic point-cloud captures produced by 3DGS training pipelines — through the renzora_gaussian_splatting distribution plugin, which wraps the vendored bevy_gaussian_splatting renderer. Drop a scanned scene or object into your level and it renders with full view-dependent lighting baked into the capture, no meshes or materials involved.

Supported formats

Extension	What it is
`.ply`	The de-facto 3DGS capture format (as exported by the original INRIA pipeline, Polycam, Luma, gsplat, etc.)
`.gcloud`	`bevy_gaussian_splatting`'s compact binary cloud format
`.sog`	PlayCanvas/SuperSplat's compressed bundle (Spatially Ordered Gaussians, ~15–20× smaller than PLY) — the default SuperSplat download
`.ssog`	Loaded as a renamed `.sog` bundle (no such format officially exists)

.ply is shared with mesh data. The importer sniffs the PLY header: files carrying 3DGS spherical-harmonics properties (f_dc_0, …) import as splat clouds (copied verbatim), while mesh PLYs (with faces) keep converting to GLB like any other model.

Plain point clouds work too. A faceless .ply that's just colored points (CloudCompare exports, LiDAR scans, Sketchfab's converted downloads) loads as a splat cloud as well — the engine synthesizes an isotropic splat per point, sized from the cloud's point density. Use the component's Splat Scale to fatten or thin the result. Note .splat (antimatter15) and .spz (Niantic) files are not supported — re-export those as .ply or .sog (SuperSplat can). Streamed SOG (an unbundled lod-meta.json + chunk-directory tree for web LOD streaming) is also not supported — export a plain bundled .sog.

Getting a splat into a scene

Import the .ply / .gcloud file (Import overlay or drag it into the Asset Browser). Splat files are copied as-is into your project.
Drag it from the Asset Browser into the 3D viewport. The drop spawns an entity at the cursor's ground position with a Gaussian Splat component pointing at the file. (Splats are 3D content — there is no 2D-view drop.)

Alternatively use Add Entity → Gaussian Splat in the hierarchy and point the component's Source field at a file afterwards.

The Gaussian Splat component

The scene stores a serializable GaussianSplat component — a project-relative source path plus per-cloud tuning; the plugin resolves it into the live renderer state at runtime (the same path-in-component pattern models, audio, and particles use, so scenes stay portable).

Field	Meaning
Source	Project-relative path to the `.ply` / `.gcloud` file (accepts asset drag-drop)
Opacity	Uniform opacity multiplier over every splat (0–1)
Splat Scale	Uniform size multiplier over every splat — fattens/thins the gaussians without moving them

Position, rotate, and scale the cloud with the ordinary transform gizmos — the entity Transform applies to the whole cloud.

How it works

The plugin ships as a cdylib in plugins/ (Runtime scope): the same code renders splats in the editor viewport, in-editor play, and the shipped game. Remove it from plugins/ and GaussianSplat components become inert data — scenes still load and save cleanly.
Splats draw only through cameras tagged with the renderer's GaussianCamera marker. The plugin tags every 3D camera automatically once a scene contains a cloud, so editor viewports and game cameras "just work"; isolated utility cameras (material preview, thumbnails) are left untouched.
Splats are depth-sorted per view every frame (GPU radix sort by default). Very large captures cost sort time proportional to their splat count — prefer .gcloud for big scenes and trim captures in your 3DGS tool where possible.
After the blended color draw, each cloud runs a second depth-only pass that writes the solid core of every splat (soft fringes excluded) into the view depth buffer. This is what lets depth-reading effects — volumetric fog, depth of field — treat splats as real surfaces instead of sky, and lets transparent geometry drawn later depth-test against them.

Limitations

Splat clouds don't cast or receive engine lighting or shadows — lighting is baked into the capture. Standard geometry occludes splats correctly (and vice versa) via depth.
4D (spacetime / animated) gaussians and 2DGS surfel modes exist upstream but are not yet exposed through the editor component.
Physics does not see splats; add colliders by hand where needed.