Image-to-3D models are good now. You give Idol one picture of a toy fox, and about a minute later you can spin a 3D fox in your browser, including the back it never saw. Then you try to print it, and you hit a wall: the model did not make a mesh. It made a Gaussian splat , a cloud of soft, semi-transparent blobs. Slicers want a closed surface, and a cloud of blobs has none.

This post is about getting from that cloud to a clean, watertight STL. The method that worked is old and simple. Getting to it took four failed attempts, and the failures are the useful part.

Code: https://github.com/helgard-orlm/splat2stl . It converts a splat in 8–16 seconds on an 8 GB RTX 5060 with one command.

Who did what, up front: I set the goal, judged every result in a slicer, and made the two calls that mattered: "your first version was almost perfect, everything after it is worse" and "why not photograph the fox from all sides, like photogrammetry apps do".…