Blender 5.3 will import and render Gaussian splats without third-party add-ons

The Blender developers have added native support for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to version 5.3. Gaussian splats can now be opened through the standard importer and rendered with any of Blender's built-in engines. Previously, this required third-party add-ons.

Version 5.3 is in the alpha stage, which will last until September 30. The final release is scheduled for November 10. The feature can already be tried in experimental builds. In the release notes, the developers list its known limitations.

What Blender 5.3 can do

Gaussian splats describe a scene with a multitude of small semi-transparent primitives that recreate the shape and appearance of objects. They are most often used to reconstruct a 3D scene from photos or video. Each splat stores a position, size, orientation, opacity and a color that depends on the viewing angle. In Blender, this data is stored as a point cloud (PointCloud) of the new 3D Gaussian Splats type, with splat parameters written to attributes:

• position, scale (vector) and rotation (quaternion);
• opacity and base brightness in the radiance:base attribute;
• spherical harmonics coefficients, which determine the color when viewed from different sides, in the radiance:sh_* attributes.

Import supports two formats: PLY and SPZ (up to and including version 4). When loading a PLY file, Blender determines on its own from the geometry and attributes whether the file contains splats. Coordinates from SPZ files are automatically converted to Blender's axis system. There is no export to either format in 5.3, so an edited scene cannot yet be saved back to a splat format.

Splats render in Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles. By default, they are assigned an emission shader that takes brightness from the radiance attribute, so there is no need to build a node tree manually. Geometry Nodes gets three changes:

• the Set Point Cloud Type node switches a point cloud between regular points and Gaussian splats;
• the Import SPZ node loads SPZ files procedurally, inside the node tree;
• the Import PLY node now recognizes splat files and outputs them as a point cloud, and its output socket has been renamed to Geometry.

Known limitations

The release notes list three known issues:

• performance is still far from optimal;
• rendering is not always correct. The pipeline is designed for sRGB colors, while Cycles and EEVEE work in linear space, so splats with low opacity and high brightness may display with errors;
• Apply Transform handles scale, rotation and spherical harmonics attributes incorrectly.

From add-ons to native support

Until now, splats were loaded into Blender with third-party extensions, such as the KIRI Engine plugin or BlendSplat, built on Geometry Nodes. In June 2026, Sergey Sharybin, Blender's development lead, opened task #159470 on integrating Gaussian splats into import/export and rendering and published an experimental branch with a prototype. The original plan included PLY and SPZ import and export, rendering first in Workbench and EEVEE with Cycles support to follow, and a performance target: handling 10 million points confidently, with the prospect of reaching 100 million. The feature made it into the 5.3 alpha with Cycles support but without export.

Besides splats, 5.3 brings other rendering changes. Principled BSDF gains built-in dispersion, and several new nodes have been added for controlling material lighting. The full list of changes is published in the official Blender 5.3 release notes.

What this means for the industry

About three months passed between the opening of the design task and the feature's appearance in the alpha. Judging by this, the Blender developers probably regard Gaussian splats as a full-fledged 3D data format. This is consistent with the broader trend: 3DGS support is being added to game engines, web viewers and visualization tools, and scans of real-world locations are increasingly used in VFX, archviz and previz.

Small studios and independent artists will probably benefit most from native support. They will no longer have to keep track of add-on compatibility with new Blender versions. Authors of third-party extensions may have to focus on tasks not yet covered by the core, such as exporting or processing splats. If the original plan holds, export, optimization for heavier scenes and editing tools will apparently arrive in future versions.

Community reaction

The community greeted the news with clear enthusiasm: artists, technical specialists and even visual effects supervisors are glad that Gaussian splats will finally arrive in Blender as a standard feature — without third-party add-ons and in all engines at once: Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles. The tone is almost unanimous: "finally", along with surprise at how quickly a task opened in June has already made it into the 5.3 alpha. There are practical caveats, but they don't spoil the mood. Some note that for now this is basic import and rendering without export; others are already playing with demos in the alpha and noticing that splats can glow. Developers of 3D scanning apps are quick to pick it up: add-ons for walking around inside scans are appearing on top of the native support. There is no outrage — rather a sense that Blender is catching up with the industry faster than expected.

"Wait, what? Native Gaussian splat support in Blender? 🤯"

— @gleb_alexandrov (X)

"Oh my God, finally!!!"

— @stefceretti (X)

"Amazing. The task was opened in June and it's already done. Love how fast Blender is moving!"

— @seanboisselle (X)

Why are Gaussian splats coming to Blender right now: the 3D scanning boom, pressure from competitors, requests from add-on authors?