Free tool
Free Online Gaussian Splat Viewer
Drop in a 3D Gaussian Splatting .ply file and orbit it in your browser. The file stays on your device, and you do not need a Sculptly account to use this.
Sculptly returned a splat alongside every mesh until 16 September 2026; splats from those generations still download, and new ones are mesh only. Have a mesh instead? Open it in the GLB viewer, which also lists its triangles and textures.
Why use this viewer
100% private
The .ply is read from a local blob URL. This page has no upload endpoint — a 25 MB splat would be a slow thing to upload anyway, and there is no reason to.
Completely free
No account, no card, no rate limit. All eleven browser-based tools here are free to use.
No installation
Splat files usually mean installing a desktop viewer or a Unity/Unreal plugin. This runs in a normal browser tab.
WebGL2 required
Sorting hundreds of thousands of splats every frame is real work. A recent laptop or desktop handles it; older phones will struggle, and this page says so rather than hanging.
INRIA-format .ply
The standard 3D Gaussian Splatting layout — f_dc_*, opacity, scale_*, rot_* per point. That is what Sculptly exports, and what most training pipelines produce.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Gaussian splat, and how is it different from a mesh?
A mesh is triangles with a texture stretched over them. A Gaussian splat is a cloud of soft, oriented, semi-transparent blobs — each point carries a colour, an opacity, a 3D scale and a rotation. There are no faces at all, which is why it captures soft edges like fur and foliage well and why you cannot 3D print it or drop it straight into a game engine as geometry.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read locally and rendered from a browser-local blob URL. There is no upload endpoint on this page.
Why is it slow, or why did my tab run out of memory?
A typical splat file is 25 MB and holds several hundred thousand points, all of which have to be depth-sorted as you orbit. That is far heavier than a GLB of the same subject. If it will not load, the file is likely larger than your device can hold — this is a limit of the hardware, not of the format.
Which .ply files work here?
Binary little-endian .ply files in the standard 3D Gaussian Splatting layout. A plain mesh .ply — vertices and faces, as exported by most 3D software — is a different thing that happens to share the extension, and it will not render here.
Where do I get a Gaussian splat to try?
Sculptly returned one alongside every mesh until 16 September 2026. The model it runs now makes a mesh only, so new generations have no splat, but splats from earlier generations still download. Otherwise, splats come from a training run on video or many photos, or from public scene collections, and any standard uncompressed .ply opens here.
Why a Gaussian splat .ply is so large
A splat file stores every point as a row of 32-bit floats, and the row length is fixed by the header. So the size is simple arithmetic: number of splats times bytes per splat, plus a header of a few hundred bytes. The one setting that moves it most is the spherical-harmonics degree, which adds f_rest_* columns for colour that changes with viewing angle.
| Harmonics degree | Floats per splat | Bytes per splat | 384,672 splats | 1,000,000 splats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 (base colour only) | 17 | 68 | 24.9 MB | 64.8 MB |
| 1 | 26 | 104 | 38.2 MB | 99.2 MB |
| 2 | 41 | 164 | 60.2 MB | 156.4 MB |
| 3 (usual training output) | 62 | 248 | 91.0 MB | 236.5 MB |
A real file, measured. A splat Sculptly generated from one photo in August 2026 is 24.9 MB: a 416-byte header, then 384,672 splats of 68 bytes each. It carries base colour only, no f_rest_*, which is why it is a quarter of the size the same point count would take at degree 3. Every one of its normals (nx, ny, nz) is exactly zero: 12 of every 68 bytes, 4.4 MB in total, hold nothing the renderer uses. A Gaussian has no surface normal; the column is there because the standard layout has always had one.
That is why this viewer can take a while on a phone with a big file, and why a splat is so much heavier than a GLB of the same subject. Compressed formats such as PlayCanvas's compressed .ply and .spz store the same splats in fewer bits and are several times smaller, but they are not the layout this page reads. What each property means, and how to tell a splat .ply from a mesh .ply by its header, is covered in Gaussian splat .ply files, explained.
A splat .ply and a mesh .ply share the extension and nothing else. The header tells them apart in a few seconds.
Gaussian splat .ply files, explained →