Gaussian splats
A collection kind whose rows are soft coloured blobs, reconstructing real photographic scenes rather than 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 describing how the blob is stretched and turned, an opacity, and a colour. Thousands or millions of them blend into something photographic.
It sits alongside Points and Geometry (meshes) as a collection kind, on the same spreadsheet-of-rows model, with rows that draw as soft blobs instead of dots or faces.
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 (Gaussian Splat). That is the appeal: a place or object captured with its soft, real lighting already in the data.
.spz files load too, the compressed format that is roughly a tenth the size of the equivalent PLY, and it is what a dropped PLY is quietly cached as so the second open is fast. The file dialog does not offer it as a filter, so point the path at an .spz by typing or dropping it rather than browsing for it.
You can also build them from something you already have. Wire a source into the Gaussian Splat node and it converts:
a points cloud into splats fitted to the local shape of the cloud;
a mesh into splats scattered across its surface, tinted by its colour or material;
a volume into one splat per filled voxel.
This is how an ordinary object takes on the soft, blobby splat look, or a scan-like point cloud becomes a renderable splat cloud.
What you can do with them
A splat scene behaves like any other collection.
Move and transform the whole cloud, or parts of it.
Run them through a simulation, pushing splats around with forces, scattering or deleting rows.
Recolour or filter rows.
Render them in the same scene as meshes and shapes, lit and composited together.
Convert them back to another kind: into a points input to read them as points, into the Volume node to bake a density cloud, or into the Mesh node to pull a soft surface over them.
Export them back out (3D & splat export).
A capture can be far heavier than the shot needs, so three controls on the load trim it before anything renders. Spherical Harmonic Degree drops the view-dependent colour detail a rung at a time, from Full down to Degree 0, which is the cheapest single win on a big scene. Opacity Cull discards splats fainter than a threshold. Max Splats caps the count outright. All three apply as the file is read, so they cost nothing downstream.
Splat sequences
A splat capture can also move over time, a person turning, a plume of smoke, a scene filmed as it changes. It arrives as a folder of frames, one splat file per moment, exported by the capture tool.
Load the folder, not a single file. Point the Gaussian Splat node's File Path at the folder of frames. The node reads them in order and plays one frame per timeline frame, so scrubbing or playing the timeline moves the splats. A single file stays a single still splat.
Play and scrub freely. The timeline drives playback like any other animation. Long sequences stream a window of frames around the playhead, so memory stays bounded whatever the folder holds. The first play-through of a heavy sequence loads as it goes, and later loops run smoother once frames are cached.
Export it back out. Send a moving splat into an Export node, choose the splat format, and set a frame range. One numbered splat file is written per frame, as a folder you can re-load or hand to another tool.
Each frame of a captured sequence is its own independent reconstruction, so playback snaps to whole frames rather than cross-fading between them. Every frame looks exactly as it was captured.
A collection that renders like a cloud
A splat scene is a collection you edit row by row, and it renders as soft volume rather than a hard surface.
Splats have no faces and no surface normals. Operations that need real geometry, boolean, bevel and mesh-only modifiers, do not apply. Shape a splat scene by editing its rows: deleting, moving, recolouring.