Short answer: choose a splat to look at something photographically, and a mesh to do anything with it. A splat is a photographic record; a mesh is a surface you can edit, animate, collide with, relight and print.
| Gaussian splat | Mesh | |
|---|---|---|
| What it stores | Millions of soft coloured blobs | Triangles or quads, plus textures |
| Looks photographic | Yes — fuzz, foliage and sheen included | Only as good as its textures and lighting |
| Edit the shape | No | Yes |
| Rig and animate | No | Yes |
| Relight | No — the lighting is baked in | Yes, with PBR materials |
| Collisions and physics | Needs a separate collision mesh | Yes |
| 3D printing | No | Yes |
| Typical size | Large, unless compressed | Small to large, set by polygon budget |
When is a splat the right choice?
- Showing a real place. A room, a site, a street — a walkthrough or a backdrop where what matters is that it looks like the photographs.
- Digital-twin views. Somewhere people need to see as it is, from any angle, on a link.
- Hard-to-model subjects. Plants, hair, fabric, clutter: things a mesh needs enormous detail to fake.
- Backgrounds behind meshes. A splat environment with interactive mesh objects placed in it is a common combination.
When is a mesh the right choice?
- Game assets that move, get hit, or have to run on a budget.
- Anything rigged. Skeletons need a surface to deform.
- Product models that must change colour or material, which needs real materials rather than baked colour.
- Printing, which needs a closed surface.
Can you have both?
Often you want both, and they do different jobs in the same scene: the splat for what the world looks like, a mesh for what you can touch. A simple collision mesh for the splat's floor and walls is what lets a player walk through a splat environment without falling through it.
In Zetta 3D
The Studio makes both. Generate 3D and Generate Smart 3D make meshes; Generate Splat makes splat objects and splat worlds — and a world can be exported as a mesh or a collider mesh when you need a surface after all. Mesh tools such as retopology and rigging do not run on a splat itself. The Gaussian splat generator page describes what the splat side produces.