Load Gaussian PLY Enhance

You've got a Gaussian Splat .ply - from SHARP, Trellis, a scan pipeline, whatever - and you want to actually look at it inside ComfyUI or wire it into a 3D workflow. This is the node you start with. Despite the "Enhance" in the name it enhances nothing: it's a plain file picker whose whole job is turning a .ply on disk into three clean outputs (a path plus two camera matrices) that the rest of the pack can chew on. Which is fine. That's what an input node is for.

Why the name lies to you. PlyPreview is a fork of the gaussian-splat GeometryPack, repackaged under PlyPreview* names so the two packs don't overwrite each other. The "Enhance" suffix is a collision-avoidance rename, not a feature bump. It's a useful lie - you can run this pack next to the original without the node registry fighting.

What it does

The ply_file dropdown is populated by scanning ComfyUI's input/, input/3d/, and output/ folders for .ply files. Drop a splat into input/3d/ and it appears in the list. See "No PLY files found" and that's just the dropdown telling you there's nothing in those folders yet.

Beyond picking the file, the node decides the camera that the preview will start from:

• fov_degrees (10–180°, default 50) - horizontal field of view. Crank it wide for fisheye-style views; the tooltip genuinely supports up to 180°.
• auto_resolution (default enabled) - computes a square resolution from FOV and target_scale, rounds to 16-pixel alignment, applies a 0.8 calibration factor, and clamps to 256–8192. Leave it on unless you have a reason not to.
• image_width / image_height (default 512) - only used when auto_resolution is disabled, to build the intrinsics matrix by hand.

The camera itself is fake-but-consistent: extrinsics default to the identity matrix (camera at origin), and intrinsics are derived from FOV and resolution (fx = width / (2·tan(fov/2)), square pixels, centered principal point). This isn't photogrammetry-grade calibration - it's enough to make every preview start from the same sensible viewpoint.

There's also enable_opacity_filter + opacity_threshold (default 0.1): apply a sigmoid to the stored opacity and drop every Gaussian below the threshold, writing a new _opacity{threshold}.ply next to the source. Great for shaving background floaters off a noisy splat. It only runs if the file actually has an opacity field - otherwise it skips with a console warning, which is the kind of graceful failure more nodes should copy.

Outputs

All three outputs are strings/matrices you feed forward: ply_path (STRING) into Preview Gaussian Enhance, plus optional extrinsics (4×4) and intrinsics (3×3) as the initial view seed.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/XuanYu-github/comfyui-PlyPreview.git

Restart ComfyUI. Or search "comfyui-PlyPreview" in ComfyUI Manager. Dependencies are just numpy and plyfile - that's the entire story. No CUDA, no compiled C++ rasterizer. If you've been burned by 3DGS nodes that need nvcc and a matching CUDA toolkit, this pack is the relief: the rendering happens in your browser via the bundled gsplat.js, not in Python.

Common issues

• "No PLY files found" - the file isn't in input/, input/3d/, or output/. Move it there. The pack also registers a /plypreview/files endpoint so the dropdown can refresh without a ComfyUI restart.
• Auto resolution silently overrides your width/height. If something downstream needs exact camera geometry, flip auto_resolution to disabled and set image_width/image_height explicitly.
• Preview comes up blank - the viewer pulls files through ComfyUI's /view endpoint for the output folder, so a splat living in input/ can 404 in the iframe. Copy it to output/.
• If the console warns about plyfile missing, pip install plyfile in your ComfyUI environment.

None of this is glamorous. It's a loader. But it's the loader that stops the "how do I even open this file" part of a 3D workflow from being the hard part.