We Cut the Splat Editor in Half

Announcement · 2026-07-28 · 4 min read · by SplatMart Team

You told us the editor had too many buttons. We removed 16 of the 41 controls on screen, moved four selection tools to the keyboard, and added two one-click actions that do the jobs people were doing by hand.

The most consistent piece of feedback we get about the SplatMart editor is that it has too many buttons. People open a splat they just generated, want to delete some floaters and straighten it up, and instead meet a wall of thirty-odd icons with no obvious starting point.

That is a fair complaint, and it was our fault rather than a mystery. The editor is built on PlayCanvas SuperSplat, an excellent general-purpose splat tool designed for people doing every kind of splat work there is. Most of you are not doing every kind of splat work. You are cleaning up one capture so you can sell it or hand it to a client. We had been shipping the whole workshop when what the job needs is a workbench.

So we cut it. The editor went from 41 controls visible the moment it loads to 25.

What is gone

The largest removal is the animation system: the timeline, keyframes, camera-pose tracks, and video rendering. It is a genuinely capable flythrough-video authoring tool, and it had nothing to do with selling a splat. It occupied a panel, a status-bar tab, nine controls, a ten-field export dialog, and eight keyboard shortcuts.

Alongside it:

• The View Options panel dropped from thirteen rows to four: background colour, grid, field of view, and fly speed. The other nine were rendering-debug controls, such as spherical-harmonic band count and centre-point size, that had no bearing on how a finished splat looks to a buyer.
• The splat display-mode toggle appeared twice, in the top centre and again in the right toolbar, firing the same action. Both are gone.
• The gizmo pivot toggle, the selection-overlay button, and the measurement tool have left the toolbar.
• The Render menu is gone. Rendering a still image, which is genuinely useful for listing thumbnails, moved into File then Export.
• The Help menu no longer links to video tutorials for a differently-skinned version of the editor, which was more confusing than helpful.

Four selection tools instead of eight

The toolbar offered eight ways to select splats. Rectangle, lasso, brush, and box remain as buttons, and between them they cover essentially all cleanup work. Polygon, flood, sphere, and eyedropper selection still exist and behave exactly as before, but they now live on the keyboard: P, O, S, and Ctrl+E respectively.

Nothing was taken away from anyone who was using those tools. Press Help then Keyboard Shortcuts to see the full list, which is now the first item in that menu precisely because it matters more than it used to.

Two new one-click actions

Removing buttons is only an improvement if the remaining path is shorter. Two jobs that everybody was doing by hand are now single actions in the Select menu.

Crop to Selection keeps everything inside your selection and discards the rest. This is the whole point of box-select on a room scan: draw a volume around what you are actually selling, then remove the surrounding capture noise in one step. Previously this meant Invert followed by Delete, which is two undo steps and one wrong order away from deleting your subject instead. It is now a single undoable action, and it refuses to run on an empty selection rather than silently deleting everything.

Ground / Centre drops the splat onto the ground plane and centres it over the origin. Generated splats arrive in whatever coordinate frame the camera solve produced, so they float, sink, or sit off to one side, and buyers expect a model to sit on zero when they import it. This translates only; which way is up is still your call with the rotate gizmo, because a bounding box alone cannot tell us.

One save, not three

When you open a splat from your dashboard, the editor used to show three competing ideas of what saving means, one of which wrote a file to your computer that went nowhere useful. With a project open you now see one Save, and it writes a new version back to My Splats.

The file-based commands, New, Open, Import, and Save As, still appear if you open the editor directly without a splat loaded, where you genuinely do need to load a file from somewhere.

If you want the full toolset

We are not trying to be the most capable splat editor in existence. If your work needs keyframed camera animation, video export, per-band spherical-harmonic controls, or the selection tools we moved to the keyboard, PlayCanvas SuperSplat is free, open source, and excellent, and our editor is built on it. Export a PLY from SplatMart and open it there.

What we want to be is the fastest path from a generated capture to something you can sell. That means the common jobs should take one click, and the rare ones should be out of the way rather than crowding the screen.

The changes are live now. Open any splat from My Splats to see them, and if we removed something you were relying on, tell us in Discord. Bringing a control back is easy; we would rather hear about it than have you work around it.

Frequently asked questions

Did you remove any editing capability?

The animation and video-rendering system was removed outright. Four selection tools moved from the toolbar to keyboard shortcuts and work exactly as before. Everything else that was cut was a display or debug option that did not change the splat itself.

How do I use polygon, flood, sphere, or eyedropper selection now?

Press P for polygon, O for flood, S for sphere, and Ctrl+E for eyedropper. The full list is under Help then Keyboard Shortcuts.

What is Crop to Selection?

It keeps everything inside your current selection and deletes the rest, in one undoable step. It is the inverse of Delete Selection and the fastest way to cut a room scan down to the part you are selling.

What does Ground / Centre do?

It moves the splat so its lowest point sits on the ground plane and it is centred over the origin. It only moves the splat; it does not rotate it, so you may still need the rotate gizmo to set which way is up.

Can I still render a video of my splat?

Not in the SplatMart editor. Export a PLY and use PlayCanvas SuperSplat, which the editor is built on and which retains the full timeline and video-export system.

I preferred the old editor. Can I get the controls back?

Tell us which ones in Discord. We removed controls based on what the marketplace workflow needs, and if we cut something people are actually using, we would rather restore it than have you work around the gap.