Gaussian Splatting Tutorial: Phone Scan to SketchUp, Step by Step
Part 9 of our Gaussian Splatting Series, this is the free entry point: no scanner, just the phone in your pocket.
1. Phone capture vs the K2: what can a beginner achieve free?
When you bring Gaussian splatting into your design workflow, you will invariably have to answer the question: what hardware can I afford or what hardware suits my enterprise?
For anyone starting out, I can highly recommend starting with phone capture before buying a five-to-eight-thousand-US-dollar machine. Now, a phone is by no means a cheap product these days, especially a flagship but any device between $600 and $1,000 is a wonderful starting point, because its processing power is enough to run a scanning app and document any and every kind of object.
My initial advice: download the Luma AI app, the Polycam app, the RealityScan app, and the Scaniverse app. I personally use Scaniverse the most, but the others have their pros and cons. Spend a Saturday afternoon testing them against each other you'll see where each one shines and which workflow suits you
2. Which app, and why: a Scaniverse walkthrough
Let's use Scaniverse. Download the app; a relatively new choice greets you, you can use it in its classic format or the new format that includes cloud processing. We'll start classic.
On registering (or skipping registration), the app asks to know your location. That's not a real issue to me what it does is geo-mark your splat on a global map, so you can search other splats recorded across the world. If you're doing an exterior splat, it's nice to upload it for the community. Imagine Google Street View, but for splatting. And if the splat is private, don't share it leave it in your private library, which is currently free to use.
Then, to record:
Press the plus icon at the bottom centre of the app.
Choose SPLAT, not MESH. The splat is the most lifelike scan. (It will ask again when you select a scanning type; splat both times.)
Read the capture instructions slowly — front, bottom, top, around, over, sideways. If you ever do meshes, set the LiDAR distance carefully here too.
Choose your processing mode, then close the guide with the X in the top right.
The capture technique
I generally start at about shoulder height, camera pointed down at roughly 45 degrees toward the object, crosshair in the middle of it, trying to keep the whole object in view from the start. White and red dots appear around what you're scanning as it registers.
The image will be very blurry for the first part of the scan this is intentional. As you move around the object, scanning from high angles and low angles, the image becomes less blurry. That's the app telling you it is gaining accuracy and detail. The less blurry the view, the better the scan is becoming. Fine detail texture, form, colour differences deserves extra time from all of those angles.
Keep the scan to two to three minutes. Beyond that, your phone's CPU and GPU are overloaded with information and processing gets difficult. Two minutes goes quickly, so pay attention to what you're scanning; as you approach two and a half to three minutes, confirm you've collected what you came for and that all the edges of your object look sharp. Then press the red square to stop.
Your phone or tablet will feel warm, it has just taken an enormous amount of photo and video material. When asked, save your raw data: it's stored alongside the processed scan and lets you reprocess later with different settings. I normally enable it, but keep an eye on your storage long-term.
Then process, ideally with the device plugged in. At your desk, use the wall plug; on site, carry a power bank.
3. Processing without a big GPU
Depending on your phone's graphical capability, it will either process the scan as best it can on your high-end hardware, or warn you that the phone isn't of a high enough standard for complex scans.
If your phone is on the weaker side, skip the classic mode and use the cloud version of the app instead the processing happens off-device. What the purchase or subscription model will look like, I don't currently know, and I haven't seen the provider talk about it either.
4. First import into SketchUp
This is where Scaniverse gets really interesting for SketchUp users: right from the earliest release of the Gaussian Splats extension, SketchUp has supported the SPZ format that Scaniverse exports.
So the path is short: save the file from your phone to Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive → download it on your desktop or laptop → import it through the Gaussian Splats extension
One thing to watch on first import: the SPZ file doesn't always come in correctly on the Z axis you may have to adjust the scan's orientation once it lands
5. Where the free workflow hits its ceiling
A free app on a phone, hardware not engineered for Gaussian splatting will hit limitations, and it's worth being honest about them: the quality of your camera, the quality of your GPU, and handheld shakiness.
The big one is LiDAR. Most phones don't have a LiDAR laser in them. Some iPhone and iPad Pro flagship models do, and that genuinely adds a level of detail and accuracy to your splat but most Android phones give you no hardware acceleration through LiDAR, and that's fine, as long as you know what it means.
It means you're not going to get 10-to-12-millimetre accuracy. You're looking at more like 200 to 500 millimetres — 20 to 50 centimetres, call it a foot. In a four-by-four-metre room, you'll probably be about a foot off.
And that's fine. Not everything has to be scanned to shopfitting or manufacturing tolerance. As they say in photography: the best camera is the camera you have with you — not the one at home. We always want to travel with the Lixel and be on site with the Lixel. But sometimes you're on site to review ongoing work, the Lixel stayed at the office, and you realise the site needs a scan now. The only Gaussian splatting you can do is with your phone and that gives you an observational model you can share through the Scaniverse cloud, export as a file for any viewer, or simply upload to SuperSplat in a browser.
When the work turns out to require real accuracy, you make another appointment and bring the scanner. But that first scan happened, on the day, free. That is the great beauty of scanning with a cell phone.
Once you've tested this and want more: if you're based in South Africa, get in touch with Chris Keightley at BuildingPoint SA (ckeightley@buildingpointsa.com) about Lixel scanner options, and visit the XGRIDS Lixel website to learn about the professional hardware. For more, our YouTube playlist covers the Gaussian splat recording process and the import to SketchUp, so you can start designing inside a splat.
Thanks for reading, we wish you a great week:)
Next in the series: Gaussian Splatting vs Photogrammetry vs LiDAR, what a designer actually needs.
YouTube playlist link
