Gaussian splats

A first-class kind of collection: clouds of soft coloured blobs that reconstruct real, photographic scenes — not hard-edged meshes.

What a splat collection is

A Gaussian splat collection is a collection where every row is one splat — a small fuzzy ellipsoid of colour. Each row carries its position (@P), a size and orientation (how the blob is stretched and turned), an opacity, and a colour. Pile up thousands or millions of them and they blend into something that looks photographic.

It sits right alongside Points, Geometry (meshes) and Curves (lines & paths) as a collection kind — same spreadsheet-of-rows model, just rows that draw as soft blobs instead of dots, faces, or strokes.

Where they come from

Splats usually come from the real world: trained from a set of photos or brought in from a 3D scan, then loaded as a .ply or .splat file (input.gaussian_splat). That's their whole appeal — capturing a place or object with all its soft, real lighting baked in, instead of modelling it by hand.

What you can do with them

Because a splat scene is just a collection, it behaves like one:

• Move and transform the whole cloud, or parts of it.

• Run them through a simulation — push splats around with forces, scatter or delete rows.

• Recolour or filter rows like any other collection.

• Render them in the same scene as your meshes and shapes, lit and composited together.

• Export them back out (3D & splat export).

A collection that renders like a cloud

This is the "in-between" to keep in mind: a splat scene is a collection you edit row-by-row, but it renders like soft volume, not a hard surface.

See also

• Collections — the spreadsheet model all kinds share

• Points — the closest sibling kind (positions you instance onto)

• Rasters (images) — the other "looks like more than it is" type

• 3D & splat export — importing and exporting splat scenes