For those who don’t know the tool: 3DF Zephyr turns photographs and video into point clouds, meshes, textures and survey data for VFX, games, mapping, infrastructure and heritage work.
Gaussian splats enter Zephyr
3DF Zephyr 9 adds Gaussian Splatting generation directly to 3Dflow’s photogrammetry application. Users can generate a splat inside Zephyr without transferring the reconstruction to a separate application.
The new workflow accepts either a sparse point cloud or a mesh-derived dense cloud. A sparse cloud provides the faster route, while a dense cloud can first be refined with Zephyr’s photoconsistency process. The latter is intended to produce a more detailed input for the splat generator. Generation parameters remain accessible for manual adjustment rather than reducing the process to a fixed preset. This gives photogrammetry teams two starting points within the same project: a quicker sparse-cloud workflow for iteration and a refined dense-cloud route when visual quality takes priority.
Maps arrive in the viewport
Satellite and hybrid map tiles can now be loaded underneath a georeferenced 3D model in the viewport. Survey, infrastructure and other geographically anchored projects can therefore inspect a reconstruction in its wider map context without leaving Zephyr.
The maps strengthens Zephyr’s role in 3D scanning and survey workflows, where checking the placement and surroundings of reconstructed data can be as important as inspecting the model itself.
New navigation and Bubble View tools
Version 9 introduces a tripod-style camera controller similar to the navigation mode available in 3DF Scarlet. The update is intended to make controlled movement through reconstructed scenes easier.
Control-point placement and drawing on Bubble View images have also been revised. These changes target operations that require users to identify corresponding locations or draw directly against captured imagery.
Volume of Interest expands
Volume of Interest selection is now available across the selection tools, including plane, RGB, triangle and point-based selection. Users can define a spatial region and restrict an operation to the data within it, leaving the rest of the object untouched.
This should make local cleanup and analysis more practical on large reconstruction datasets, particularly when only one section of a point cloud or mesh needs attention.
Faster photoconsistency
3Dflow says it has improved Zephyr’s core processing technology, including faster photoconsistency operations on large point clouds. The vendor has not supplied benchmark figures, so production teams will need to measure the performance gain with their own datasets and hardware.
Photoconsistency remains relevant beyond conventional mesh output because the refined dense cloud can now feed the Gaussian Splatting workflow. The improvement therefore affects both established mesh reconstruction and the new point-based output path.
Export and video additions
Zephyr 9 adds custom reference-system support during export and an ESRI mesh export option. These additions extend the hand-off options for GIS, survey and infrastructure pipelines. A new Video Stream Preset is also included.
Together with the viewport and selection changes, these additions make version 9 a broader workflow update rather than a single-feature Gaussian Splatting release. Studios should validate output compatibility, coordinate-system handling, processing performance and splat quality before introducing the update into production.
