Rendering Tutorial For 3D Gaussian Splatting

The first render should answer a simple question: is the trained splat worth delivering? Open the source PLY or checkpoint export in a viewer that can orbit, zoom, and inspect the whole scene. Look for floaters, doubled surfaces, missing backsides, unstable colors, giant outlier Gaussians, and areas that only look good from training cameras.

Do this before compression because lossy runtime formats can hide the cause of a problem. If the source PLY has a floater, compression did not create it. If the source is clean but the runtime output shimmers or loses detail, the conversion settings or viewer are likely responsible.

Most real splats need a cleanup pass. Browser editors such as SuperSplat are useful for selecting and deleting floaters, cropping unwanted floor or sky, adjusting orientation, and exporting optimized versions. The safest cleanup approach is iterative: remove obvious junk, save a new copy, inspect again, and avoid deleting ambiguous details near silhouettes.

Unlike mesh editing, splat editing changes a cloud of appearance primitives. A selected blob may contribute to multiple views, especially near transparent or reflective regions. Use multiple camera angles before deleting a cluster. If a tool supports brush, lasso, sphere, or box selection, combine them with camera navigation rather than relying on a single screen-space rectangle.

PLY is the common source and interchange format. It is large and slow to download, but it preserves data and is widely supported. SPZ, SOG, SPLAT, and KSPLAT are runtime or compressed formats with different viewer ecosystems. Pick the format based on where the model will run, not only on file size.

For web delivery, SOG and SPZ are especially important because they reduce transfer size dramatically. SOG is designed around PlayCanvas and web delivery, with compressed WebP-backed data and streaming options. SPZ is an open mobile-friendly format from Niantic and is useful when Scaniverse or SPZ-compatible viewers are in the pipeline.

A web viewer has different constraints from a desktop preview. The model must download quickly, decode without blocking too long, fit GPU memory, and remain interactive on a range of devices. A 300 MB PLY may be fine on a workstation and miserable on a phone. Convert or stream before publishing.

Use a viewer that matches your needs. A general viewer is enough for preview and sharing. SuperSplat is better when the scene needs cleanup, publishing, or authoring. PlayCanvas is a strong route for interactive web scenes and apps. Spark and GaussianSplats3D are useful when you are building custom Three.js or WebGL/WebGPU integrations.

Game engines and 3D apps treat splats differently from meshes. A splat provides appearance, not collision, UVs, rigging, or physically meaningful surfaces. In Unity, Unreal, Blender, or PlayCanvas, plan how the splat should interact with cameras, lighting, UI, collision, and other geometry.

For interactive apps, you may need a companion mesh or voxel collision representation. Some workflows generate collision or navigation data separately from the splat, then render the splat as the photorealistic visual layer. This separation is normal: use splats for captured appearance and meshes for physics, occlusion proxies, or gameplay logic.

For image and video output, a splat editor with camera animation can be faster than bringing the scene into a full DCC tool. Set the camera path, choose resolution, render a still or video, then inspect edges and depth ordering artifacts. If the same scene will be embedded on a website, test both media render and real-time navigation.

Final QA should include visual checks and performance checks. Look for sudden detail loss during camera movement, transparency artifacts, popping in streamed LOD, orientation mistakes, and excessive load time. If the model is part of a public product page, add fallback imagery or a smaller format for devices that cannot render the full asset.