This is a substantial community update for the free and open-source 3DGS Render add-on.
Highlights
- Added Blender 5.2 support while retaining Blender 5.1 compatibility.
- Improved proxy-rigging deformation and added GPU acceleration for spherical-harmonic rotation during baking, with automatic CPU fallback.
- Added real-time relighting and Eevee mesh-shadow support.
- Render-mode splats now follow Blender's per-proxy visibility controls. The Outliner eye/monitor controls affect the live viewport; the camera/render control affects offline stills and animations. Animated render visibility, excluded view-layer collections and render-disabled collections are respected.
- Fixed normal Blender duplication of Gaussian proxies. Shift+D copies are discovered automatically, rendered with their own transform/visibility/animation and kept independently positioned during source-transform refreshes and offline renders. Each copy currently adds another complete splat set to the GPU, so duplicate large scans with care.
- Proxy-binding validation problems now show a clear Blender warning instead of a Python traceback. A rejected proxy cancels cleanly without parenting or locking the splat.
- Improved handling of degree-0 Gaussian-splat PLY files that do not contain optional higher-order spherical-harmonic attributes.
Thank you to Hrsh-Venket/Eric Arthur Blair - https://github.com/Hrsh-Venket https://x.com/Eric4rthurBlair - for the proxy-rigging, GPU, Blender 5.2 and major refactoring work, and to @punk-kaos for Blender 5.2 support, real-time relighting and mesh-shadow work.
This release was clean-installed and tested on Windows with Blender 5.1.1 and Blender 5.2.0 LTS. Please report reproducible issues and include your Blender version, operating system, GPU, test file and the steps that triggered the problem.
Experimental relighting notes
Real-time relighting is an artistic approximation: ordinary Gaussian-splat files do not contain the complete surface, material and lighting information needed to reproduce Blender's physically based renderers. World/HDRI support provides smooth diffuse illumination, not sharp HDRI reflections. It recognizes Texture Coordinate → optional Mapping → Environment Texture → Background → World Output; complex World node chains are not evaluated.
Point lights render six shadow views, so refreshing a high-resolution point-light cache takes more time and GPU memory than a Sun, Spot or Area shadow. The shadow resolution control is per view. Native-mesh shadows support up to four lights; direct relighting still supports up to sixteen.
GS self-shadows are a sampled proxy approximation rather than true volumetric Gaussian transmission. Their detail and refresh cost depend on Total Max Cards, Alpha Cutoff, shadow resolution and the number of cached lights. Keep the feature off when it is not needed, and begin with a cropped object or a low shadow resolution.
GS to Mesh Shadows (Eevee) is separate from Cached Shadows (Mesh to GS). Enable the former and use Rebuild Gaussian Shadow Proxies when you want the splats to cast an approximate Eevee shadow onto ordinary Blender meshes. Use the Rendered viewport with Scene Lights enabled. Each splat receives a parented, unselectable proxy; Total Max Cards is shared across the scene. The proxy remains hidden from camera rays while casting the shadow.
The GitHub code may move ahead of packaged releases, written documentation and existing tutorials as the project transitions toward community maintenance.