3D Gaussian Splats in Unreal Engine 5: Generate Worlds & Objects Free

There is a real revolution happening in 3D Gaussian Splatting right now. In just the last few months we got a wave of open-source, local tools that generate both objects and entire worlds as splats - free, on your own GPU, no scanning rig and no cloud. And we can finally drop all of it straight into Unreal Engine 5, where it actually renders and does not destroy your FPS.

This is the short, link-heavy version of the whole stack: the plugin that renders splats in UE5, the CLI that converts them and builds colliders, the browser editor for cleaning them up, and exactly where to generate worlds and objects locally for free. Every link is in the list at the bottom.

Watch the full build

The whole setup and the tests, start to finish, on YouTube.

1. Render splats in Unreal Engine 5: the plugins

Unreal Engine does not support splat files (.ply, .sog) out of the box, so you need a plugin. There are plenty of small experimental ones; I tested the three most popular and here is the honest breakdown.

• NanoGS - my pick right now. Built for recent Unreal versions (5.7), easiest to install, more stars, better English docs, actively supported. Only handles .ply for now (SOG hopefully soon).
• MLSLabs Renderer - the only one that also does 4DGS (sequences of splats - animated/volumetric capture). Comes in Lite (PLY only) and Pro (adds the compressed SOG format), but Pro is test-only right now and stamps a watermark in the viewport. Despite the GitHub page saying 5.5, the Google Drive releases include a 5.7 build.
• XScene (XVerse) - one of the first, but it tops out at Unreal Engine 5.5, so I skip it for new projects on 5.7/5.8.

2. Convert, add colliders, and clean splats

Splats come in a few formats and Unreal only eats a couple of them, so you will want one tool to convert back and forth and, more importantly, to build collision - because a raw splat is just floating color, it has no geometry to stand on or drive against. That tool is splat-transform, PlayCanvas’ CLI. If you have Node.js installed it is a one-line install (ChatGPT will write the exact command for your file), and it both converts formats and exports a collider mesh as .glb.

# install (needs Node.js)
npm install -g @playcanvas/splat-transform

# convert a raw .ply into compressed SOG
splat-transform scan.ply scan.sog

# export a collision mesh (.glb) from a splat
splat-transform car.ply car-collider.glb

Bring that collider .glb into Unreal, line it up with the splat, set its collision to Use Complex Collision As Simple, tick Actor Hidden In Game, and you have a splat you can walk, drive, or fall onto. It works the same for objects and for whole worlds.

To actually edit a splat - trim the junk, cut away the parts you do not need - the easiest option is SuperSplat, a free editor that runs right in your browser. Drop a splat in, lasso the bits you want gone, delete, export. You cannot do this in Blender yet, so for cleanup this is the go-to.

3. Where to generate splats - worlds and objects, free

You can grab ready-made splats from libraries like SuperSplat (some are free for use with a credit), but the fun part is generating exactly what you need. Two open models cover the two halves, and you can run both locally or use their free websites.

Worlds - Hunyuan World 2.0

Hunyuan World 2.0 turns a single image of a location into a full 3D world as a splat. It is released under an Apache license with all the code and checkpoints (GitHub), so a strong GPU (~24 GB VRAM) can run it locally, or just use the website for free. A single generation can take 20 minutes or more, because it also builds a clean collider for you - which is a genuinely nice bonus. The paid alternative is Marble (World Labs), which also has a free tier and exports GLB - but Hunyuan held up just as well, sometimes better.

Objects - TripoSplat

TripoSplat is the easy one for objects: it needs only ~8 GB of VRAM and is natively supported in the latest ComfyUI - install ComfyUI, search the TripoSplat template, install any missing dependencies, set the output to PLY, and go. Generations land in about a minute (the Hugging Face demo is even faster if you do not want to bother with ComfyUI). Drop the result on Unreal and it is already pretty optimized, as long as you do not push into millions of gaussians.

Performance: what actually holds up

Both plugins claim millions of splats at 60 FPS, and on objects and tidy scenes it really is smooth. The honest ceiling: above ~10 million splats it is still a bottleneck, because Unreal has no streaming format for splats yet. Keep a scene under ~1 million total splats and you will usually be fine.

All the links

New AI-3D tools that feed this kind of workflow land constantly. When they do, they go straight into the 3DGS Compare and the Arena so you can test them before you commit. For more engine workflows, see Claude Code + Unreal Engine 5 and the splats-go-playable guide.