Aug 11, 2026Tools
Houdini gets first-party splat relighting
Image: SideFX Labs · Tools
SideFX Labs' August update ships three nodes that make captured gaussian splats behave like standard CG assets inside Houdini.
Why it matters: Baked-in lighting has been one of the biggest blockers to using captured splats in film and VFX pipelines. First-party tooling in Houdini — a pillar of professional VFX — makes splats a first-class citizen in workflows where they used to be a novelty.
Zoom in:
- Relight GSplats is a LOP that relights splats using standard USD lights and physically based shading, with image-based lighting and optional shadows — and it can blend the relit result with the original appearance to preserve reflective materials.
- Delight GSplats is a SOP that strips baked-in lighting to recover approximate diffuse albedo.
- Normals from GSplats is a SOP that reconstructs the underlying surface and transfers normals onto splat points.
Catch up quick: The tools debuted as prototypes announced alongside Houdini 22 in June, shipped in prototype form in July, and are now finalized in this Labs release. SideFX Labs is free and releases on its own cycle.
