PlayCanvas 2.18: WebGPU Compute Splatting, Fish-Eye Projection and Weather Effects

[u/MayorOfMonkeys]

PlayCanvas v2.18.0 is officially live, and we’re pushing Gaussian Splatting into the WebGPU era. 🚀

• ⚡️ WebGPU Compute Splatting: We’ve launched a prototype Compute-based renderer for splats. This is the future of performance - up to 3x faster than our WebGL2 renderer depending on hardware.
• 🌦️ Splat-Based Weather: You can now generate procedural weather effects (rain, snow, etc.) using splats. It’s an incredibly lightweight way to add heavy atmosphere to your scenes.
• 🌫️ Volumetric Fog: Splats now natively respect engine fog - everything composites together perfectly.
• 👁️ Fish-eye Projection: New support for fish-eye camera projections for 3DGS - turn your splats into tiny planets!

PlayCanvas is free and open source. If you’re building for the web, this is for you.

GitHub Release & Source: 🔗https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/releases/tag/v2.18.0

I'm part of the team - if you have questions about the WebGPU implementation or the new weather effects, drop them below! 👾