Glossary
Splats and training
Section titled “Splats and training”Gaussian splat
Section titled “Gaussian splat”A way to describe a scene as many small, soft, coloured blobs (“splats”), each with a position, a size and orientation, an opacity and a colour that can change with the viewing direction. Seen together, they reproduce the scene from any angle. Blender 5.3 displays and renders Gaussian splats natively.
Splat object
Section titled “Splat object”A Gaussian splat in Blender: an object whose data holds the splats. SplatPilot puts its results in a Splats collection and lists them in the Results panel. You can move, rotate and scale it like any object and render it; to export it, keep its scale uniform.
Training
Section titled “Training”Fitting a splat to the rendered views: step by step, the splats move, grow, shrink and change colour until the splat looks like the views. SplatPilot trains on your graphics card.
One round of training. More steps refine detail and take longer. The qualities use 7,000 (Draft) or 30,000 (Standard and High).
Splat budget
Section titled “Splat budget”The most splats a result may have, set by the quality or by Max Splats (in thousands). A larger budget can hold finer detail and needs more GPU memory.
SH degree
Section titled “SH degree”How much a splat’s colour may change with the viewing direction, stored as spherical harmonics (SH). Degree 0 is one colour per splat; degree 3 holds sheen and soft reflections but needs every surface seen from many directions. See Training settings.
Preview
Section titled “Preview”The splat so far, shown in the viewport as <name> (training) while a new splat trains. It is
replaced every 15 seconds by default and removed when the result arrives.
Checkpoint
Section titled “Checkpoint”A saved state of a training. SplatPilot writes one every 5 minutes and when you pause, so a training can resume after a failure and Improve can train a finished splat on later.
Recipe
Section titled “Recipe”What a splat was made with: the quality and settings of the click, the views as rendered (with
the render engine), the training’s steps, splat budget and SH degree, the versions and the date. SplatPilot keeps it on the
splat with its subject, and as a .json beside its trained file. Results shows it in one line, and
Use Its Settings applies its settings again. See
Results.
One camera position and direction that SplatPilot renders. Views come from automatic planning, from rigs or from cameras, as the Views panel’s Source says. In the viewport they are drawn as small camera frusta.
Training view
Section titled “Training view”A view the splat is trained on. Drawn in amber by default.
Test view
Section titled “Test view”A view the splat is not trained on but scored on, so its score says how well the splat holds up from angles it never saw. Set by Test Views (5% by default). Drawn in red by default. Also called a held-out view.
Geometry view
Section titled “Geometry view”A cheap view of an environment (small, one sample, no denoising) that teaches the splat where surfaces are rather than their colour. Automatic views are picked among them. Drawn in grey when shown.
Placed views
Section titled “Placed views”With automatic views: the views of the current settings once Views, Render or Create Splat has planned them, shown in the viewport and listed in the Views panel. Placed for other settings, they are drawn faint and the Views button shows red.
Whether a subject is an object, seen from outside, or an environment, a space or a set seen from within and around it. Two tabs in the Setup panel.
Subject
Section titled “Subject”What becomes the splat: the selection, a collection or the whole scene, set by Subject in the Setup panel. When there is nothing to splat, a line at the top of the Create Splat panel says what is wrong. With Subject Only (an object chosen by selection or collection), the views show the subject alone.
Coverage
Section titled “Coverage”How well views see the scene, in two parts: how much of the surface they see (Surfaces), and from how many directions (Directions). Each part counts against a larger set of cheap views and reads “Enough” at the point where more views stopped improving splats in our tests (94% of the surface, 88% of the directions); below it, a share such as “72% of enough”. With both enough, more views would add little at Draft’s training. The Coverage panel shows both parts with a verdict such as “Enough views” or “Few directions”. An environment’s automatic views have a coverage once they are picked; Check Coverage measures it for rigs, cameras and objects. A coverage holds for the views and the subject it was measured for; after a change it reads “Outdated”. See Views.
Coverage map
Section titled “Coverage map”Where the views fall short: the scene’s surfaces as spots coloured Good, Fair, Weak or Unseen, with the weak and unseen ones grouped into problem areas you can step through and frame. There is one after Check Coverage and after an environment’s views are picked; Map, a button with an eye in the Coverage panel, draws it. See Views.
Focus point
Section titled “Focus point”A sphere Empty you place over what matters most in an environment. Focus Weight gets it seen from more places; Focus Detail makes training work harder there.
A set of views you place and shape yourself: a sphere, dome, cylinder, grid, ring or the vertices of a mesh. Each rig is a collection inside the SplatPilot collection. See Rigs and targets.
Active rig
Section titled “Active rig”The rig selected in the Views panel’s rig list. Its settings show below the list, and its handles in the viewport.
Anchor
Section titled “Anchor”The Empty that places a rig: move, rotate and scale it to move, turn and size the rig. Usually parented to the target, so the rig follows it.
Target
Section titled “Target”The object a rig’s inward views aim at: at its origin (Point), the closest point of a line (Segment) or the closest point of a box (Box).
Handles
Section titled “Handles”The yellow arrows and rings in the viewport that shape the active rig and its target when you drag them: radius, height and size, segment ends, box size.
Quality and scores
Section titled “Quality and scores”Quality
Section titled “Quality”A set of five numbers (views, image size, samples, splat budget, steps): Draft, Standard or High.
Quality preset
Section titled “Quality preset”Your quality settings saved under a name, for any file or scene. Inside a Blender Project, presets can be shared with everyone on the project.
Peak signal-to-noise ratio, in decibels (dB): how closely the splat matches a view, pixel by pixel. Higher is better. It compares runs of the same views; between scenes it says little, as the background and the scene’s detail move it. Each doubling of the views added about 2 dB in our tests.
Estimate
Section titled “Estimate”The rows at the top of the Create Splat panel: Views, Images, Splats, VRAM, Disk, Render and Train, and Time for both once the render time is known. Measure (Measure Render) times two views to know it.
The graphics card’s own memory. Training needs enough of it for the splats and the views; the estimate shows how much.
Storage folder
Section titled “Storage folder”The splatpilot folder where SplatPilot keeps a file’s rendered views, training runs and results:
next to the .blend, or in the Blender Project. See Storage and Blender Projects.
Rendered views
Section titled “Rendered views”The pictures and data of the views, in the storage folder’s datasets/. Training reads them;
they can be rendered again when deleted.
Training run
Section titled “Training run”One training’s folder in jobs/: its log, previews and checkpoint. Open Run Folder in a
splat’s menu opens the splat’s last one.
Blender Project
Section titled “Blender Project”A folder that Blender 5.3 treats as a project, for files a team works on together. SplatPilot stores its files there and can share quality presets.
A file format for point data that Gaussian splat tools commonly use. Export… in Results saves a splat in it, with Format: PLY.
PlayCanvas’s compressed format for Gaussian splats on the web (“spatially ordered Gaussians”): a zip of WebP images, about 15 times smaller than a PLY. Export… in Results saves a splat in it, with Format: SOG.
COLMAP
Section titled “COLMAP”A layout for cameras, images and points that many splat training programs read. The Splat Training Dataset export writes it for Postshot, GraphDECO 3DGS, OpenSplat and LichtFeld Studio.