A gaussian splat generator that runs on your own graphics card.

What you actually get

A .ply file, written into the project folder on your disk while the splat is being built. It is there before you think to look for it, and the card opens that folder with the file already selected.

• Three densities. 65,536 gaussians, 131,072, or 262,144. The largest is the ceiling of the model itself, so the highest setting is as much detail as this approach can produce.
• It opens in what you already use. Postshot, SuperSplat and Blender all read the .ply as it is written.

Making one, step by step

1. 1
   Drop a photograph onto the board. Anything with a subject you can point at: something you shot, a screenshot, a frame from a film, an image you generated somewhere else.
2. 2
   Frame the subject. Draw a rectangle around the object and LocalMesh rebuilds it on its own, three quarter view, on black. Reconstruction wants that kind of picture, and a real photograph almost never is one. Skip this if your subject is already cut out.
3. 3
   Set the first button to Splat. The bar under a ready photograph reads like a sentence, and its first button says 3D mesh. Switch it to Splat and the next button becomes the density: Low, Standard or High. Start with Standard. Go to High when the object has detail worth a heavier file.
4. 4
   Press Generate. The card shows its own progress. When it is done, its More menu, the ⋯ button, gives its numbers: how many gaussians, how long it took, the file size, and the seed that produced it.
5. 5
   Open the file. The .ply is already on your disk, in a folder named after the subject: Show in Explorer, in the ⋯ menu, takes you to it. To save a copy somewhere else, set the format button to .ply and press Export.

Four photographs are for the mesh

A splat is made from one photograph. If you have four of the same object, front, right, left and back, leave the card on 3D mesh and set it to 4 views instead: the reconstruction stops inventing the sides it cannot see, and the back is built from your photograph of the back. Count roughly twice the time of a single photograph.

Worth it when the back of an object looks nothing like the front. Not worth it on something symmetrical.

Splat or mesh, and how to choose

Both come out of the same photograph and you decide, card by card. They are not two steps of one process.

• Take the splat when you want to look at the thing: move around it, judge its volume, show it to someone. It holds soft edges and light better than a surface does, which is why foliage, fur and fabric survive it.
• Take the mesh when something downstream needs geometry: a game engine, a renderer, a modelling package. It arrives with its UVs, a colour atlas and a roughness map, and it takes a shader. Rebuild it in quads if you mean to sculpt or subdivide it.

What it will not do

• It is not a scanner. One subject, rebuilt from a picture of it. It does not walk around a room, and it does not replace photogrammetry when you need to record a real place at real measurements.
• It needs a readable subject. A crowded photograph gives a crowded result. That is what the framing step is for.
• Windows and NVIDIA. Windows 10 or 11 and an NVIDIA card; LocalMesh is built for 8 GB of video memory and runs on smaller cards, one level down. The models download once, on first launch, and settle at around 27 GB.