Hi,
Throughout the beta period, API might change slightly based on feedback and other inputs. We try and keep samples up to date to reflect these changes.
In this case Beta 2 has seen some updates to the API, and in particular USDKit has added some more API that enabled the sample to include processing splats data from USD files.
Regarding your question on conversion, you can open PLY files in Preview and export it as a USDZ. You can also use the command line tool usdcat with usdzip to do the same.
While the Preview app does not include a splats renderer, you can visualize the splats as points by switching the renderer to Storm. You can do this on macOS 27 by going to the editing / markdown toolbar and switching your renderer.
Note that in macOS 26, we also support this conversion but it uses a preliminary version of the schema that is unsupported going forward and was marked as such in the files.
macOS 27 uses the final form of the splats schema that we worked on in the Alliance for OpenUSD. So definitely make sure to use macOS 27 for the conversions.
Also be mindful that splats in PLY don’t have a standard convention for encoding or orientation. We support conversion of the most common splats encoding in PLY, but you may encounter issues with other variants of splats. Also USD’s up axis is defined in its layer metadata and defaults to Y up, many splats files default to Y-down due to COLMAP norms. But as this is not always the case, we do not apply an orientation conversion automatically.
If your asset is upside down in Preview, you can go to Tools > Adjust Size and rotate it.
