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Social Media: Thousands of animated PLY files enter Volinga Suite. One NVOL asset leaves, considerably easier to misplace.
For those who don’t know the tool: Volinga provides a standalone Suite for processing Gaussian Splat assets and a Plugin that renders them in Unreal Engine.
From static splats to animated captures
Volinga has added support for 4D Gaussian Splatting across Volinga Suite and its Unreal Engine Plugin. The coordinated update introduces a pipeline for importing a time-ordered sequence of PLY files, encoding that sequence as a single NVOL asset and playing the result in Unreal Engine.
In this context, the fourth dimension is time (Recently read a physics book, dimensions are wild.) A conventional 3D Gaussian Splat represents a captured scene at one state. A 4DGS sequence contains successive states of a subject or environment, allowing captured motion to be reconstructed and rendered rather than merely viewed from different positions. Pretty much like single frames making a movie.
Volinga is not announcing a new foundational 4DGS training algorithm. Its contribution is a production interface, asset container and playback workflow around animated splat data generated elsewhere. The company announced the update at SIGGRAPH and made the new versions available on July 30 2026. Its supplied release describes an end-to-end process for dynamic scenes and lists further compatibility, memory and Unreal workflow changes. So, not just a demo.
PLY sequences become one NVOL
The source material is a sequence of PLY files exported by a third-party 4DGS solution. Volinga names Gracia and Houdini-based workflows as examples. Each file represents an animation sample, so a useful shot can generate hundreds or thousands of separate files before anyone has even started arguing about the final frame range.
Volinga Suite imports the sequence and converts it into one NVOL asset. Volinga describes the encoding as near-lossless and says it substantially reduces storage requirements while retaining visual and animation data. These are vendor claims, and Volinga has not published a general compression ratio or an objective image-quality threshold that could be applied across arbitrary productions. The practical result will therefore depend on the source sequence, its splat count, duration and temporal complexity.
The single-container approach is nevertheless operationally significant. It removes the need for the Unreal project, asset-management layer and transfer system to treat every sample as an independent PLY file. That should simplify copying, versioning and ingest, although the NVOL remains a Volinga-specific delivery asset rather than an interchange format intended for arbitrary DCC applications.
The workflow does not make PLY obsolete. PLY remains the incoming sequence format and can also be rendered directly by the plugin for static splats. NVOL is the optimised output used to carry the processed scene into Volinga’s real-time environment.
Playback inside Unreal Engine
The encoded NVOL is imported through Volinga Plugin and placed in an Unreal Engine scene as a Radiance Fields actor. Volinga exposes playback to Unreal Sequencer, enabling artists and technical directors to position dynamic splats on the same production timeline as cameras, conventional animation, lighting and other scene events.
Radiance Fields actor properties are also exposed to Sequencer. This is artist-facing control, rather than merely API-level access: supported properties can be animated and adjusted through the timeline interface. Rendering settings have meanwhile moved to actor properties, reducing the need to hunt through global configuration for controls that logically belong to an individual splat asset.
Volinga states that users can place an unlimited number of 4DGS assets in one scene. That describes the absence of a software-imposed asset-count cap, not infinite practical capacity. Or, you know, just see when the workstation spits out the Graphics card and becomes a open fire. Scene complexity remains bounded by VRAM, system memory, storage throughput, output resolution and the cost of sorting and drawing the active splats. Unlimited menu permission continues to encounter very finite graphics cards.
The plugin carries established Volinga functions into dynamic assets, including lighting interaction, Cull Volumes and OpenColorIO colour management. Cull Volumes provide an in-engine mechanism for excluding unwanted regions, while OCIO connects the rendered result to Unreal’s configured working-space and display pipeline.
Lighting interaction should not be confused with complete mesh-equivalent illumination. Volinga’s current documentation describes additive lighting that modifies splat appearance while preserving captured lighting. It also states that splat actors do not cast shadows onto themselves or other Gaussian Splat actors and do not provide physics interaction. Those limits remain relevant when combining a moving captured subject with CG props, contact shadows or physically interactive environments.
More formats at the Unreal end
The Plugin update adds compatibility with SPZ and SOG files alongside PLY and NVOL. SPZ and SOG are alternative methods of storing Gaussian Splat data, so their inclusion broadens the range of upstream tools from which static assets can enter the Unreal pipeline. Compatibility here means the plugin can ingest or render the stated formats, not a guaranteed identical interpretation of optional attributes, colour transforms or spherical-harmonic data from every generator. A round trip through representative source applications remains the more useful test than a logo collection on a compatibility page.
NVOL continues to carry Volinga-specific features and optimisation. SPZ and SOG support is therefore best understood as wider ingestion rather than that all formats are functionally interchangeable.
VRAM, large files and DLSS
Volinga says it has “improved” VRAM efficiency and removed the plugin’s previous 4 GB file-size limit. The latter is relevant to dense or animated captures, where a single packaged asset can grow beyond limits inherited from earlier file-handling paths. The company has not published a new absolute maximum file size.
The release also integrates NVIDIA DLSS. DLSS is a rendering and reconstruction technology applied to the Unreal output; it does not compress the NVOL source or improve the geometric accuracy of the captured splats. Its value lies in rendering at a lower internal resolution and reconstructing the delivered image, where supported, to trade some GPU workload for temporal reconstruction.
https://web.volinga.ai/introducing-4d-gaussian-splat-support/
https://docs.volinga.ai/en/home/volinga-suite/release-notes
https://docs.volinga.ai/en/home/volinga-plugin/release-notes
| Product | Volinga Suite and Volinga Plugin |
| Developer | Volinga |
| Release status | Released |
| Availability | Available from July 2026 |
| Principal workflow | PLY image sequence to compressed NVOL asset, followed by real-time playback in Unreal Engine |
| Host compatibility | Unreal Engine 5.8 |
| Operating systems | Windows; Plugin requires a compatible NVIDIA GPU |
| Suite minimum hardware | Intel tenth-generation Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 5 3000 equivalent, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 |
| Suite recommended hardware | Intel thirteenth-generation Core i7 or newer or AMD Ryzen 7000 or newer, 96 GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX A6000 48 GB |
| Processing backend | NVIDIA GPU |
| Input formats | PLY sequences; static PLY, SPZ and SOG support in the Plugin |
| Output format | NVOL |
| Unreal integration | Sequencer controls, actor properties, Sublevel Streaming, Content Browser shortcuts, lighting interaction, Cull Volumes and OCIO |
| Licence models | Subscription seats for Plugin Basic; sales-led Pro and Enterprise subscriptions; offline licensing available for Suite |
| Trial | 14-day Plugin trial, watermarked and non-commercial |
| Documentation | Suite release notes and Plugin release notes |
| Download | Volinga account portal |
| Website | Volinga |
| Pricing | Plugin Basic: €10 per seat per month, billed yearly at €120, or €15 per seat per month billed monthly. Pro and Enterprise pricing is available from sales. |
