WebGPU 3DGS Renderer

A desktop 3D Gaussian Splatting renderer written in Rust with wgpu, winit, and egui.

The renderer loads a PLY Gaussian scene, computes per-frame camera-space depth on the GPU, sorts splats with a GPU radix sorter, and draws the result through a WebGPU render pipeline. A small egui overlay exposes camera controls and live performance information.

Features

• Native desktop window powered by winit
• WebGPU rendering through wgpu
• 3D Gaussian Splatting draw path with spherical harmonic color coefficients
• GPU depth computation and GPU radix sorting for back-to-front splat rendering
• PLY loader for:
  • 3DGS-style PLY files with f_dc_*, optional f_rest_*, opacity, scale_*, and rot_* properties
  • Basic point cloud PLY files with x, y, z, and optional RGB color properties
• Interactive camera movement
• egui panels for camera position/rotation and performance stats

Requirements

• Rust toolchain with edition 2024 support
• A GPU and graphics driver supported by wgpu
• macOS, Windows, or Linux with the platform dependencies required by wgpu/winit

Getting Started

Clone the repository, then run the app from the project root:

cargo run

The current default scene is loaded from:

resource/Raspberry/scene.ply

To use a different scene, change the path passed to load_gaussians_from_ply in src/renderer.rs.

Controls

• W: move forward
• S: move backward
• A: move left
• D: move right
• Hold left mouse button and drag: look around
• Camera panel: edit position and rotation directly
• Reset button: restore the default camera

Development

Run the test suite:

cargo test

Check compilation without running the app:

cargo check

Project Structure

src/
  main.rs                  Application entry point
  app.rs                   winit application lifecycle
  app_state.rs             Window, egui, renderer, and frame orchestration
  wgpu_context.rs          wgpu surface/device/queue setup
  renderer.rs              Main renderer, GPU resources, input, and render loop
  renderer/
    camera.rs              Camera math and uniform layout
    gaussian.rs            Gaussian data model and GPU storage layout
  resource/
    ply_loader.rs          ASCII and binary little-endian PLY loader
  ui/                      egui widgets and performance overlay
shaders/
  gaussian.wgsl            Gaussian splat rendering shader
  gaussian_depth.wgsl      Depth compute shader
third_party/wgpu_sort/     Local GPU radix sort dependency
resource/                  Sample PLY scenes and licenses

PLY Input Notes

The loader requires vertex positions named x, y, and z.

For full 3D Gaussian Splatting data, the loader expects:

• DC color coefficients: f_dc_0, f_dc_1, f_dc_2
• Optional higher-order SH coefficients: f_rest_0 through f_rest_44
• Opacity: opacity
• Log scale: scale_0, scale_1, scale_2
• Quaternion rotation: rot_0, rot_1, rot_2, rot_3

For basic point clouds, RGB properties can be named either red/green/blue or r/g/b. If no color is present, points are rendered white with a small default scale.

Supported PLY formats:

• ascii 1.0
• binary_little_endian 1.0

Troubleshooting

• If the app fails to start with an adapter or surface error, verify that your GPU driver supports the backend selected by wgpu.
• If scene loading fails, confirm that the PLY file exists at the configured path and includes x, y, and z vertex properties.
• Large scenes may require a GPU with sufficient storage buffer limits. The renderer requests adapter limits for large buffers during device creation.