3D Graphics

Three.js114.3k★

Three.js brings 3D to the browser: interactive visualizations, product configurators, entire games, all running in WebGL. It wraps WebGL (the low-level browser graphics API that nobody wants to write by hand) into something you can actually build with. Everything is free. MIT license, no paid tier, no cloud service, no account, and nearly two decades of development. The ecosystem is massive: loaders for every 3D format, physics engines, post-processing effects, VR/AR support. The documentation and examples library is one of the best in open source. Self-hosting isn't really applicable. It's a client-side library you bundle into your app. Install via npm, import it, and start rendering. The catch: the learning curve is steep if you've never touched 3D math. Cameras, lighting, materials, geometry. It's a different mental model from DOM manipulation. Performance optimization requires understanding the GPU pipeline. And the API surface is enormous, which means lots of ways to do things wrong before you find the right one. For simpler use cases like displaying a single 3D model, consider react-three-fiber which wraps Three.js in React components.

Lottie32.0k★

Designers export from After Effects, developers drop the JSON file into the app, and it just plays: vector-based, resolution-independent, tiny file sizes. MIT, originally built by Airbnb. The workflow is: designer creates animation in After Effects, exports via the Bodymovin plugin as a JSON file, developer loads it with lottie-web. That JSON is typically 10-50KB where an equivalent GIF would be megabytes. Works on web, iOS, Android, and React Native. Fully free and open source. No paid tier for the renderer. The After Effects plugin (Bodymovin) is also free. LottieFiles (a separate company) offers a paid platform for hosting, editing, and collaborating on animations, but you don't need it. Solo to large teams, the library costs nothing. LottieFiles' free tier gives you basic hosting and a library of pre-made animations. Their paid plans ($20-50/mo) add team collaboration, more storage, and advanced editing. The catch: you need After Effects (or a compatible tool) to create animations. That's a $22.99/mo Adobe subscription. Not every After Effects feature is supported; 3D layers, expressions, and some effects won't export cleanly. And debugging a broken animation means digging through JSON by hand.

filament20.3k★

Filament is Google's real-time physically based rendering engine, the part of a 3D app that turns models, materials, and lights into the picture on screen. It runs on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and the web through WebGL2 and WebGPU, with backends for OpenGL, Metal, and Vulkan. Apache-licensed and completely free. Google uses it in its own products, which is about the strongest endorsement a graphics engine can get. This is a rendering engine, not a game engine. No physics, no audio, no scripting, no full editor. You work in C++, with Java bindings for Android and a JavaScript path for the web, plus a material compiler you run at build time. Prebuilt releases ship through Maven Central and CocoaPods, so you don't have to compile it yourself unless you want to. It's built to be small and fast, with a clear bias toward mobile where every millisecond and megabyte counts. If you're building a 3D viewer, an AR feature, or a custom app that needs PBR-quality visuals without dragging in Unity or Unreal, this is the lean option. Solo and small teams: a great fit if you can write C++ or use the web bindings. Larger teams shipping cross-platform graphics get one engine that covers every target. The catch is that rendering-only means you build everything around it. Scene management, input, asset pipeline, gameplay logic: all on you. Filament draws beautifully and does nothing else. If you want batteries included, reach for Godot or a full engine instead.

blender19.6k★

Blender is a full 3D creation suite: modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing in one package. It competes directly with Maya, Cinema 4D, and 3ds Max, tools that cost thousands per year. The fact that this is free and open source is remarkable. Used in film production, game development, and architectural visualization by professionals and studios. The Cycles renderer produces film-quality output. Geometry Nodes opened up procedural modeling. The community is massive and the plugin ecosystem is deep. Autodesk charges $1,875/year for Maya. Maxon charges $719/year for Cinema 4D. Blender charges nothing. The catch: the learning curve is steep and the UI, while dramatically improved in recent versions, still has its own logic that takes time to internalize. Some industry-specific workflows (like CAD integration) are weaker than commercial alternatives.

bgfx17.4k★

bgfx is a rendering library that lets you write graphics code once and run it everywhere. It sits between your game or app and the actual graphics API, Direct3D on Windows, Metal on Mac, Vulkan, OpenGL, WebGL in the browser, and handles the differences so you don't have to. The "bring your own engine" philosophy means it does rendering and nothing else: no scene graph, no physics, no asset pipeline forced on you. There's nothing to host or pay for. You pull it into your C or C++ project as a library and build. The ops reality is the build itself: bgfx is a serious C++ codebase with its own shader compiler and toolchain, so getting it wired into your project takes real setup, not a one-line install. Once it's in, it's rock solid and has shipped in commercial games. Solo developers and small studios who want cross-platform rendering without committing to a full engine like Unity or Unreal get exactly that here. It pairs well with your own engine code. This is not the pick if you want batteries-included game development, you'd reach for Godot or Unreal for that. The catch: bgfx gives you a renderer, not a game. You're responsible for everything around it, and that's a lot of work if you're not already comfortable in C++ graphics land. The payoff is total control and no licensing strings, BSD-2 licensed, free forever.

orillusion5.2k★

Orillusion is a WebGPU-first 3D engine. While Three.js runs on WebGL (the older standard), Orillusion is built from the ground up for WebGPU, which means better performance, compute shaders, and modern rendering techniques like clustered forward rendering and GPU-driven particle systems. It's fully free under MIT. TypeScript-native, component-based architecture, with a physics engine, animation system, and media extensions (video textures, chroma key). The engine is designed to feel familiar if you've used Unity or other component-based engines. The catch: WebGPU support is still limited across browsers. Chrome has it, but Safari and Firefox support is incomplete or behind flags. That means your audience needs a modern browser. At, the community is tiny compared to Three.js (111K). Documentation is sparse, examples are limited, and if you hit a bug, you're likely reading the source code. This is bleeding-edge territory: exciting if you're experimenting, risky if you're building a product that needs to work everywhere today.

DiligentEngine4.4k★

Diligent Engine is a cross-platform graphics abstraction layer. Write code once and run it against Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal, and WebGPU on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and the browser. Shaders stay in HLSL and the engine translates them to MSL, GLSL, or SPIR-V per backend. This is infrastructure for graphics programmers, not a game engine. If you are writing a CAD tool, simulation, scientific visualization, or any real-time 3D application that has to run everywhere, you either use this, bgfx, or sokol, or you write platform-specific code for each backend. Diligent is more featured than sokol and more modern than bgfx. Solo and small teams: use it freely under Apache 2.0. Metal support on macOS, iOS, and tvOS requires a commercial license from DiligentGraphics. Vulkan via MoltenVK stays free. Contact them for pricing on the Apple backends since it is not published. The catch: low-level graphics is hard. Diligent abstracts the API surface but you still need to understand descriptor sets, command buffers, and pipeline state. This does not replace Unity or Unreal. It is what you reach for when those are too opinionated for what you are building.

cell-architecture-studio1.6k★

Cell Architecture Studio is a 3D viewer for biological cell models. Seven specimen types (plant, animal, neuron, white blood, epithelial, bacterial, muscle), rendered with Three.js, with an AI tutor panel that surfaces learning prompts and tracks mastery as you click through organelles. MIT, runs in any browser, deploys to Vercel. Self-hosting is just static hosting. Clone the repo, `npm install`, `npm run build`, drop on whatever serves files. GLB models for the cells live in the public directory. The project ships its own Playwright-based visual verification that catches blank renders and major layout regressions. Biology teachers building lesson materials, science museums looking for an embeddable demo, or developers learning React + Three.js + Drei from a real codebase: useful. Production educational platforms with curriculum integration: this is a starting point, not a finished product. It's a prototype. The author labels the status that way in the README. Several specimens use procedural fallback geometry instead of real GLB models. The 'AI tutor' is a UI shell, not a connection to a live LLM. Treat it as a reference implementation worth forking, not a polished product.

zeno1.4k★

Zeno is a node-based visual programming framework for building those simulations. Picture a Houdini-like node graph but open source, built for technical artists and simulation engineers. MPL-2.0 license, C++ core. You connect nodes to build simulation pipelines: meshing, physics solvers, rendering, data processing. Supports OpenVDB, CUDA GPU acceleration, and real-time preview. The node system is extensible. Write custom C++ nodes for your specific simulation needs. Zenus Technology offers commercial licensing and support, though exact pricing isn't publicly listed. The open source version under MPL-2.0 is free for use. You can modify it but must share changes to Zeno's own files. Solo VFX artists or researchers: the open source version gives you a capable simulation platform for $0. Small studios: free, add custom nodes for your pipeline. Larger studios: contact Zenus for enterprise support and potentially proprietary extensions. The catch: and velocity means a small community. If you hit a bug or need help, you're largely on your own. The node-based paradigm has a learning curve, and documentation is limited compared to commercial tools like Houdini. For production VFX, Houdini is the industry standard. Zeno is the open source alternative for teams that can't or won't pay SideFX's licensing fees ($2K-4.5K/year).

aval1.3k★

AVAL is a new format for interactive video on the web: prerendered motion that behaves like a state machine instead of a timeline. Frame-accurate transitions driven by app state, real alpha transparency, and sequential decoding in the browser. It ships as a working toolchain (compiler, CLI, and a web component player), MIT licensed, from the Pixel Point agency. Using it is client-side: install the player element and drop it in. The build side is where the requirements stack up: Node 22+, and playback depends on WebCodecs and WebGL support, with Safari fixed only recently. Vanilla JS today; the React wrapper is still on the roadmap. Worth watching if you build marketing pages or product demos with heavy motion. Rive is the closest comparison for state-driven animation; Lottie covers vector animation without the video-like fidelity. AVAL's pitch is photoreal prerendered motion that still reacts to the user. The catch: this is an early technical preview. The 1.0 engineering release just landed, the API is still stabilizing, and the whole thing rests on one agency's continued interest. Build a toy with it now; don't bet the redesign on it yet.

TripoSplat1.2k★

TripoSplat turns a single photo into a 3D model you can spin around. Feed it one image and it generates a cloud of 3D Gaussian splats, no multi-angle capture or photogrammetry rig required. The remarkable part: both the code and the model weights are MIT licensed, commercial use included. That's rare in image-to-3D, where most models ship research-only licenses you can't build a business on. You need a GPU and a weights download from HuggingFace, but the dependency list is tiny. No diffusers, no transformers, roughly 2,000 lines across two files. There's a ComfyUI workflow and a Gradio demo if you'd rather not touch code, and inference is a single script. This replaces paid image-to-3D services like Meshy, Luma, and Kaedim for a lot of jobs, and the commercial-friendly license means you can actually ship what it makes. Solo and small teams with a GPU: run it yourself. No GPU on hand: TripoAI's own hosted Tripo Studio has a free tier and then paid plans. The catch: one photo can't see the back of an object, so the hidden sides are guessed, sometimes well, sometimes not. And you get splats, not clean editable meshes. Great for viewing and rendering, not for dropping straight into a modeling pipeline.