Marble exports: splat, collider or textured mesh?

A Marble splat preserves the generated scene's appearance. A collider mesh supplies coarse physical boundaries, while a high-quality textured mesh provides a visible polygonal asset for a 3D application. A file ending in .glb can serve either of the last two purposes, so the extension alone does not tell you what you have.

World Labs announced on September 28 that it is joining AMD. For creators assessing Marble, the immediate question is which export fits their project. The choices below follow the current product documentation.

Match the export to the job

World Labs describes splats as Marble's highest-fidelity representation and distinguishes coarse collider meshes from detailed visual meshes. Its Marble overview explains these output roles.

The mesh export documentation is more specific: collider export is included with Standard, while high-quality mesh export requires Pro. The latter is an offline generation step that can take up to an hour. The documented outputs include an approximately 600,000-triangle mesh with texture maps and an approximately one-million-triangle mesh with vertex colors. Those are different ways of carrying appearance; check which one your receiving workflow needs.

The same documentation warns of reconstruction artifacts, especially around thin structures, reflective or transparent surfaces and poorly covered areas. Selecting the high-quality option therefore does not establish that a particular railing or doorway is usable.

A gallery walkthrough needs three different answers

Consider a proposed virtual gallery: visitors walk through a room, look at framed artwork and select a painting to open its description. This is a constructed handoff example, not a Marble project we generated or imported.

A successful beauty render answers whether the room looks suitable. It does not answer whether a visitor collides with the wall, or whether the framed artwork can be selected independently.

Separate the deliverables before approving the scene:

Keep these checks separate even if the files arrived in one download. For example, a doorway can look correct while an oversized invisible collider blocks it. Improving texture resolution will not fix that boundary.

There is a documented route for authoring a simpler proxy. World Labs' Collider Builder showcase, credited to Ian Curtis on its product team, describes drawing boxes, spheres and cylinders over a splat scene and exporting the geometry as GLB. That supports the option of creating collision geometry separately. We have not tested that tool or verified a particular game-engine import.

Ask for the receiving-app view

In an earlier Hacker News discussion, jtfrench asked for low-poly geometry, texture maps and separately exported objects for game work. Another commenter, ehnto, questioned which output could actually be interacted with. These are individual requirements from a historical discussion, not evidence that current Marble exports always lack those capabilities.

For a handoff today, make the requirement visible. Ask the person preparing the scene for an image of the receiving application's result, plus the asset name and export type. A useful note could read:

Gallery entrance, revision 4
Visual asset: gallery-r4, Gaussian splat, exact exported format recorded
Collision asset: gallery-r4-walk, collider GLB
Artwork: painting-01, independent object or interaction target
Review views: entrance / doorway / closest allowed view
Unresolved: verify that the painting can be selected independently

This is a proposed handoff note. Replace every description with the actual files and observed results; it is not an exported Marble manifest.

Creatos image and text nodes can put the receiving-app render beside a collision-overlay screenshot and the unresolved requirement. That gives the reviewer a visual explanation of what is approved. The 3D import, collision editing and interaction checks take place in the relevant 3D tools.

Before accepting an export, open it where it will be used. Verify its appearance and behavior there.