GPL-3.0-or-later, as required for Blender add-ons. The full text ships in the package. You may modify it and use it commercially without limits.

No. The update check only runs when you press the button, and it is a plain request for a static file. Nothing about you or your scenes is transmitted.

Yes. It follows the standard 3DGS convention and opens in SuperSplat, PlayCanvas and splat-transform.

Press Refresh in the Culling section. Assigning an object to a Geometry Nodes socket from Python changes the modifier's dependencies, and Blender does not always rebuild its dependency graph for that on its own.

Turn on Smooth density and rebuild. The measured distance to the k-th neighbour is inherently noisy — about 84 % spread even on a uniform surface — and Coverage multiplies that noise.

Turn on Smooth orientation in the Conversion section and rebuild. Without it, every point in a voxel shares the same normal and each cell reads as a flat facet.

Objects are created in navigation mode, so this should be rare. If it is still heavy: lower Splat Size (going from 6 to 4 roughly halves how many splats a ray crosses), reduce the visible point budget, or lower the tile view radius. If you are animating a camera, use Preview mode.

You are in Solid viewport shading, which ignores material alpha entirely and draws the raw quads. Switch to Material Preview or Rendered and they become soft gaussians. Solid remains useful as a fast preview for exactly that reason.

Every splat a ray crosses with alpha below 1 consumes one transparent bounce. When the budget runs out, Cycles terminates the ray and returns black — and at splat edges alpha approaches zero, so rays cross dozens in a row. Blender's default is 8; a grazing ray needs about a dozen for a single surface. The Appearance section detects this and offers a one-click fix that raises the limit to 128 and disables splat shadows. It costs almost nothing: a transparent bounce does not trigger shading.

Not much, and it is worth being clear about why. Eevee and Geometry Nodes already render on the GPU; the limit is Blender's data model, not the drawing. 300 million points would be about 36 GB of RAM before anything is drawn. Use the import budget and levels of detail instead.

Each point uses 64 bytes in the mesh, and Blender adds roughly as much again in its own structures. As a guide: 3 million ≈ 380 MB, 12 million ≈ 1.5 GB, 20 million ≈ 2.5 GB. With tiles and levels of detail you can load 30 million and draw under 9 million. Beyond that, import a percentage rather than the whole file.