NanoGS puts ‘Nanite-style’ Gaussian splatting in UE5
VFX artist Tim Chen has released NanoGS, a neat free add-on that makes it possible to render large 3D Gaussian Splats inside Unreal Engine for VFX, games and visualization work.
NanoGS (Nano Gaussian Splatting) optimizes 3DGS data for rendering, sorting “millions of splats” efficiently and drawing only those needed for the camera view to screen.
To do so, it uses techniques inspired by Nanite, Unreal Engine’s geometry virtualization system, with Chen describing the result as “Nanite-style Gaussian splatting”.
Supporting a new set of 3DGS-based workflows for VFX and architectural visualization
A new way to reconstruct real-world objects from source images or video, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is increasingly being used in visual effects and architectural visualization pipelines as a way to integrate scanned real-world environments into shots.
NanoGS comes out of Tim Chen’s own professional experiences with these workflows – part of his day job as Lead Technical Artist at VFX and animation firm Moonshine Studio has been to develop new internal tools for Gaussian Splat editing and visualization.
Import and render large Gaussian Splat assets more efficiently in Unreal Engine
NanoGS makes it possible to render large 3DGS assets imported into Unreal Engine in PLY format more efficiently, reducing GPU memory usage, and improving interactive performance.
To do so, it uses a range of techniques, including breaking scenes automatically into LOD clusters in a similar way to Nanite, Unreal Engine 5’s geometry virtualization system.
Other optimization techniques used include screen-space error LOD selection, splat compaction, and GPU-accelerated Radix Sort.
If the demo video at the top of the story is typical, it can produce some significant improvements in performance, even on relatively old hardware: the demo scene shows more than a 4x increase in viewport frame rates on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 GPU.
Positive early feedback from VFX professionals
Although Chen describes the initial release as primarily a proof of concept, NanoGS has been getting a lot of positive feedback since he announced it on LinkedIn yesterday.
Several other users describe it as “amazing”, including Rohan Mandke, Head of Department for Unreal Engine at DNEG India.
Read about other tools for editing and visualizing 3DGS data
We’ve written about other tools for working with Gaussian Splats in Unreal Engine on CG Channel, including commercial add-on Volinga Plugin, which makes it possible to relight splats.
You can find details of free tools for visualizing 3DGS data in this story.
Price and system requirements
NanoGS 1.0 is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.6+. It’s a free download. You can find instructions on how to use it in the video above, and at the link below.
At the time of writing, the source code isn’t available, only compiled binaries, but Chen says that it will be released soon.
Download free Unreal Engine add-on NanoGS from Tim Chen’s GitHub repo
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