3D Gaussian Splatting in After Effects: How to Import, Animate, and Style 3D Splats

If you've ever tried to bring a Gaussian Splat into an After Effects workflow, you've probably run into the same problem: Adobe After Effects doesn't natively support the format. You could pre-render a video pass from a splat viewer, or route the scene through Blender first, but changing the underlying 3D viewpoint, camera path, or the timing of that camera move usually means going back to the original 3D workflow and rendering a new pass.

That's the gap the Gaussian Splatting plugin by KIRI Engine is built for. It's a free, open-source AE plugin that imports a Gaussian Splat .PLY file and renders it directly inside After Effects, so you can frame and animate the splat with an AE 3D camera instead of treating it as a pre-rendered flat video.

Why We Built This

We've spent the past few years expanding KIRI Engine, our 3D scanning app for iPhone, Android, and web, from mobile capture into 3D Gaussian Splatting, then mesh conversion, then a Blender render add-on. After Effects became a natural next step, since it's where a huge amount of finished motion work actually gets delivered. Titles, product reveals, transitions, promos. If your splat capture can't get there, it's stuck being a curiosity instead of a shot.

See how Gaussian Splats can be imported, animated, cropped, and styled directly inside After Effects.

Why After Effects, Specifically

A standalone viewer is great for exploring a splat, and Blender gives you a full 3D production environment. But for motion designers who already build their final shots in After Effects, keeping the splat inside the composition means fewer round trips between applications. Working with the splat directly in AE means you can layer it with type, footage, and the rest of your composition, without baking the camera move first and exporting a new pass every time you want to change the framing or treatment.

What You Can Actually Make With It

The plugin's effect groups map pretty directly onto specific looks you'd want in a real edit, not just abstract sliders:

• Digital disintegration. Splat Density thins out the number of rendered splats in a region, creating a breakup effect that feels different from a traditional opacity fade, more like a subject scattering into points than dissolving away. It works well for title sequences or product reveals where you want a capture to feel like it's transforming into data.

• Scan reveal. Animate the Splat Opacity shape or ramp over time so the visible region moves through the scan, gradually building it in from one direction, which works well as an intro beat before a product or character is fully on screen.

• Glitch and dream-sequence transitions. Splat Noise adds directional, layered distortion (with controls for octaves, persistence, and lacunarity), so you can push a scene from a clean scan into something shimmering or unstable for a transition or a flashback moment.

• Warp and explosion transitions. Splat Displacement pushes, scales, or rotates just part of a splat, which is the tool for a scene pulling itself apart, twisting into the next shot, or bending around a camera move.

• Selective recoloring. Color Enable, together with the Color Gradient, Color Ramp, and Color Shape controls, lets you recolor a selected region of a scan, for example pushing a product toward brand colors while leaving the rest of the scene closer to its captured look.

• Isolating a subject. Crop hides everything outside (or inside) a 3D shape, which is the fastest way to pull a clean subject out of a scan that includes background clutter.

• Point-based stylization and depth. Splat Scale can enlarge or shrink splats in a selected region, pushing a realistic capture toward a more graphic, particle-based look. The built-in depth of field controls (focus distance, aperture, and blur) can then separate a subject from its background or give a scene a miniature, macro-like feel.

Most of these localized effects use a 3D shape to define where they apply. Color, Scale, Opacity, Displacement, and Density also include ramp controls for shaping how the effect fades across that region. Crop and Noise use their shape controls without a ramp, and Depth of Field works differently altogether, based on distance from the camera rather than a shape in the scene.

This covers the effects most people will reach for first. The plugin also has a full set of Advanced controls (camera focal length, near and far crop distances, scale-based filtering) for dialing in trickier scenes, which are covered in the complete technical documentation.

The Workflow, Start to Finish

From a captured Gaussian Splat to a finished After Effects composition. The KIRI Engine plugin lets creators bring splats directly into an AE workflow for camera animation, effects, and motion design.

Import → Align → Animate camera → Style → Render

1. Import. Bring the .PLY file into After Effects as footage, then apply the KIRI_GaussianSplatting effect to a solid layer and select that footage as its source. The footage layer itself doesn't need to stay visible, since the effect renders the splat separately.

2. Align. Correct the scan's base position, scale, and rotation. This is setup correction, separate from your creative Transform controls, so you're not fighting the raw scan's orientation while you're trying to frame a shot.

3. Animate the camera. The plugin works with native AE 3D cameras, so you can build familiar orbit, push-in, flythrough, and reveal shots directly inside the composition. If the perspective doesn't match what you expect from the AE camera, the plugin also has its own Camera Focal Length control under Advanced to adjust for that.

4. Style. Layer on color, crop, noise, opacity, displacement, or density, targeting specific regions with the shape controls and, where available, using ramps to control how the effect transitions across that region.

5. Render. Finish the comp the same way you'd finish anything else in AE, with type, footage, and grading layered on top.

If you'd rather watch than read, KIRI also posts walkthroughs on its Tools YouTube channel.

Installation and Compatibility

The package uses a standard After Effects plug-in installation. On Windows, copy both the Kiri_GaussianSplatting.aex and Kiri_PlyImporter.aex files into the AE Plug-ins folder; on macOS, copy both corresponding .plugin bundles, then restart After Effects. On some macOS versions, you may also need to allow the plug-ins in the system's security settings. It's one of a growing set of free tools in KIRI's 3D Tools collection, most of which are Blender add-ons built around the same capture-to-creation workflow.

The plugin is also open source. You can inspect the source code, build it locally, report issues, or contribute improvements through the project's GitHub repository. Building from source requires the After Effects SDK and the platform-specific dependencies listed in the repository's documentation, but that's only necessary if you want to modify the plugin itself. Most users can just install the prebuilt .aex or .plugin files above.

Where to Get It

The Gaussian Splatting plugin by KIRI Engine v1.0.0 is available through the KIRI Engine 3D Tools page, where you'll find the full installation guide and troubleshooting notes. The prebuilt Windows and macOS packages can be downloaded from Gumroad, while the source code is available through the project's GitHub repository.

The plugin is completely free and open source. Most users can simply download and install the prebuilt package, while developers can inspect the source, build it locally, report issues, or contribute improvements. To create your own splats for this workflow, you can capture and export native 3DGS .PLY files directly from KIRI Engine on mobile.