LMI Splats

If you’re familiar with an ACES workflow, think of this loader as our IDT. It initializes everything required to work with splats in Houdini in a streamlined, production-ready way; no conversion, pre-bake, or prep steps needed. From the moment you load, both the viewport representation and the underlying raw attributes are correctly configured and ready to use.

Since LMI Loader is our “IDT” into the Splat world, you can work with any Houdini native SOP and still get correct harmonics once you bake. However, if you’re using OctaneRender for Houdini and want to preview your splats earlier in the process, you can use our custom Transform operator. It preserves not only Houdini-native transform behavior, but also every Splat-specific requirement needed for accurate rendering and consistent viewport parity.

Designed for non-ideal captures - especially trees and foliage. Even with LMI Mission Planner and fast drone captures, branch motion is inevitable. During training, those subtle position shifts can leak unwanted detail (like sky) into areas that are locked by SfM: the points stay fixed, but the source imagery has moving pixels. The result is false colour and luminance being baked into the higher harmonic bands, showing up as jarring hue shifts or “ghost” lighting.This tool mitigates those artifacts, producing scans that feel more natural, more evenly lit, and free of distracting high-band luminance ghosts.

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The Editor is designed as a second, more radical corrective set of passes to minimize, often eliminate, the need for manual cleanup. It detects faulty splats and provides precise ways to isolate splats that have drifted or “mutated” during training, for example by targeting specific hue or luminance ranges. It also helps identify and remove rogue and orphaned splats in a scan, ensuring the cleanest, sharpest result possible.
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Editors Color Grading features are built for both artists and technical pipelines: it grades directly in coefficient space, avoids hidden clipping, and preserves full color signal integrity. Hue is rotated with a scientifically stable model, saturation is luma-preserving, and tonal controls are signed-safe - so grading stay predictable, clean, and artifact-free.

The Deformer is, in many ways, a sibling to Houdini’s native Point Deform SOP, but purpose-built for splats. It’s designed to preserve Splat-specific data, keeping the more fragile harmonic information intact under heavier deformations as much as possible. It’s also tightly integrated with LMI Sims tools such as Infectracer and Wind: use Infectracer to derive a skeleton from the scan, drive motion with Wind, and then apply that motion back onto the splat through the Deformer.
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The Viewer lets you preview your final splats directly in the Houdini viewport - live, at full quality. It makes splat processing seamless by removing the constant roundtrip to external viewers or a render engine just to verify results, saving a huge amount of iteration time. Adapts to your local OCIO environment.
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The Baker removes the pain of long .PLY write-outs, especially on dense and animated splats where export time becomes a serious bottleneck.

The tool offers optional .SPZ compression. Compression won’t speed up export (it’s mainly a packaging step), but in addition to processing speed, it can reduce file size by ~10×, which makes storage, transfers, and archiving far easier.

.SPZ splats are supported in Octane.