Hi there,
I’m writing to request the official support for Gaussian Splat rendering (.ply files).
I’ve been working with this ~new technology for about a year or so and there have been some promising avenues opening up for me in my small city where they could really make use of this to help improve our services, museums and other offerings.
One particular company, LumaAI, has told me that to make these Gaussian Splats work they’ve had to do it in a hacky kind of way unfortunately. This is their official statement:
"The Unreal Engine plugin is a plugin. It’s not native support. We’re hijacking Unreal Engine’s rendering engine to get them to render splats - but we’re limited to what Unreal Engine allows us to modify.
There is a Niagara particle limit of 2M particles.
Overall - any further development we might do in this space would be potentially limited by the fact that this is all just hacking UE5’s rendering systems.It’s not really comparable to what would be possible if UE5 added native support."
I have seen on the marketplace some other solutions but they all rely on Niagara but one, and that one doesn’t have support for the spherical harmonics of Gaussians so the results are a bit poorer than you’d expect.
I was able to produce some really impressive results which is being rendered beautifully on LumaAI’s website:
But once imported to Unreal there are significant details being lost due to the limitations of how it’s being rendered and implemented.
To make it worse, Unity’s support for Gaussian Splats is significantly better and basically identical to the Splat itself.
I would really rather not have to use Unity for my upcoming project.
Please could you perhaps add official support for this which isn’t dependant on Niagara?
The use cases for this technology is huge and my commissioned building preservation project would really benefit from this.
Thank you