Reviewer guide

SplatPilot turns a Blender scene into a Gaussian splat, inside Blender 5.3.

Before you start

• Blender 5.3 or newer. Until Blender 5.3 is out, use the 5.3 release candidate.
• Windows or Linux, 64-bit (Linux: glibc 2.34 or newer). Not macOS.
• A GPU with Vulkan support and a current driver
• GPU memory: about 1 GB at Standard, 3 GB at High
• Disk space: about 8 GB for an object at Standard with Cycles, 26 GB for the Classroom at High. EEVEE needs about a third.
• Blender’s default colour working space, Linear Rec.709

Install

1. Download the zip for your system from the link in our email, or from your Superhive order once SplatPilot is out. Keep the file zipped.
2. In Blender, open Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions.
3. Click the drop-down arrow at the top right, choose Install from Disk… and pick the zip.
4. Open Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > SplatPilot and click Test GPU. SplatPilot compiles the engine’s shaders, once, in a minute or two.
5. In a 3D Viewport, press N and open the SplatPilot tab.

A first splat

1. Pick one object, such as a prop or a character, in the Object field of the Setup panel.
2. Leave Kind on Object and set Quality to Draft.
3. Check the estimate at the top of Create Splat. If you see Check Before Rendering under the estimate, open the list and decide on each item.
4. Click Create Splat. You can click Pause and later Resume. If you click Cancel, SplatPilot discards the training’s splat and keeps the rendered images.
5. SplatPilot adds the finished splat to the Splats collection and shows the splat alone. Your object and the cameras stay hidden until the next run. You find the splat in Results with its score.

For scale: on an RTX 4070, SplatPilot made a splat of Blender’s Classroom, a whole room, in about 2 minutes at Draft. At Standard, SplatPilot took about 19 minutes.

What to try

• A room or a landscape. Set Subject to Scene and Kind to Indoor or Outdoor. Click Cameras in the Create Splat panel, and SplatPilot places the cameras by the surfaces. Then open Coverage at the bottom of the Cameras panel and click Map. SplatPilot colours every spot by its grade, from Good to Unseen.
• Export. Click Export… in Results. Pick SOG for SuperSplat and PlayCanvas, PLY for most other splat tools, or SPZ for Blender 5.3 and Spark. In the viewer, keep the tone mapping on Linear. Where the viewer has a switch for antialiasing, turn antialiasing on.
• Rendering in Blender. For a splat you mainly render in EEVEE or Cycles, set Made For in the Training panel to Blender before training. Keep the default, Viewers, for splats you export.
• Training further. Click Improve… in Results. SplatPilot places and renders more cameras, then trains the splat further.
• Your own cameras. In the Cameras panel, open Rigs and click + to add a rig around the active object. Or open Collections and click + to add a collection of your own cameras. SplatPilot uses every section that is on, Automatic included.

Known limits

• No macOS.
• One frame per splat, so no animation.
• SplatPilot makes splats of Blender scenes and doesn’t work from photos.
• SplatPilot was tested on NVIDIA GPUs. AMD and Intel GPUs with Vulkan are untested.
• You need a Vulkan GPU to train. Without a Vulkan GPU, SplatPilot still renders the images, and you can export the images as a training dataset.
• You can run one splat at a time in each scene.
• The rendered images take several GB, 26 GB for the Classroom at High. With Clean Up… in the Storage panel, SplatPilot deletes what no splat in the file uses. With Storage Folder in the preferences, you choose where SplatPilot saves the files.

Help

You find answers to most questions in Troubleshooting and the FAQ. To report a bug, choose Help > SplatPilot: Report a Problem… in Blender, or see splatpilot.com/support for what to send. Write to mfreytag.studio@gmail.com with any other question.

For your coverage

• The licence was free. Please say so in the video or article itself.
• If you use a Superhive affiliate link, Superhive asks you to say right next to the link that you earn a commission on purchases. The word “affiliate” alone is not enough.
• An honest review is welcome, critical points included. You need no approval from Pilot Studio before you publish.
• You may use the images, clips and logos from the press kit in your coverage, monetized videos included.