Merge Gaussians (PLY Files)

This is the assembly step at the end of a multi-view SHARP pipeline. If you've generated separate .ply files - one per panorama face from SharpPredictGaussiansFromMetricDepth, or several iterative captures of a scene - this node reads all of them out of a folder, applies a couple of basic quality filters, and writes out one combined point cloud.

How it works

Point it at ply_folder and it loads every PLY inside, applies whatever depth/opacity thresholds you've set, concatenates what survives, and saves the result. Nothing fancier than that - no ICP registration, no blending across overlapping regions, no deduplication of Gaussians that landed in the same spot from two different faces. It trusts that your per-file Gaussians are already correctly placed (i.e. that the extrinsics/intrinsics feeding each source PLY were consistent), which is exactly what the rest of the panorama pipeline - AlignDepthMaps, ProjectDepthToPanorama, SharpRayToPlanarDepth - exists to guarantee before this node ever runs.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• ply_folder (required, STRING) - path to the folder of PLY files to merge.
• output_prefix (optional, default merged).
• max_depth (optional, default 0 = no filter) - drop Gaussians beyond this distance from camera. Useful for trimming stray or hallucinated far-field points that SHARP sometimes produces at silhouette edges.
• min_opacity (optional, default 0 = no filter) - drop near-invisible Gaussians. A cheap way to shrink the merged file without visibly changing the result.

Outputs: ply_paths (the individual files that went into the merge - a manifest, essentially), merged_ply_path (the combined result - this is what you open in a viewer), field_ply_path (a separate PLY export; the node doesn't spell out exactly how it differs from merged_ply_path beyond the name, so treat it as a bonus export worth inspecting rather than assume its exact contents), and num_gaussians (INT) - the final count in the merged result.

Installing it

Manager: search "Sharp," install highest (nightly if that build misbehaves). Or Manager → Git URL: https://github.com/PozzettiAndrea/ComfyUI-Sharp.git. Manual: clone, pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade, python install.py, restart.

To actually view merged_ply_path, install ComfyUI-GeometryPack separately, or drop the file into superspl.at/editor - a free browser-based viewer that also handles the "can't screenshot" gap the built-in preview has.

Common issues

num_gaussians is your first diagnostic if a merge "looks empty" once you view it - if it's near zero, check that ply_folder actually points at the right directory and has files in it before you start tweaking max_depth/min_opacity, since an empty or wrong folder produces the same visual result as filters set too aggressively.

If the merged result has visible seams where per-face Gaussians should meet, that's not something this node can fix on its own - it's a symptom of the upstream depth-alignment steps, or of skipping edge_crop on SharpPredictGaussiansFromMetricDepth, which exists specifically to trim the low-quality edge Gaussians that cause seams like this.