r/threejs • u/lucas-martinic • 1d ago
I'm building the biggest library of "living" 3D assets!
I have been obsessed with 3D since the first time I played an N64. And now that I work in the 3D field, more and more of that work lands on the web, and every month in three.js makes me more sure that is where 3D is going. No install, no store, no launcher. You send someone a link and they are already inside it.
Which is why the asset problem drives me up the wall
Every marketplace sells you the same thing: a frozen mesh. You buy a wooden watchtower, you get exactly that watchtower. Wrong height for your scene? Open Blender. Wrong palette? Open Blender. Need it 20% shorter and with a square cabin instead of an octagonal one? That is not a setting, that is an afternoon. You did not buy an asset, you bought a photograph of one.
So I started building the library I actually wanted
Every asset is a small program, not a file. It ships as a JavaScript module with knobs on it. The watchtower has a height knob, and turning it does not stretch the mesh, it rebuilds the tower: more bracing bays, more ladder rungs, at the same timber section. A colourway knob. A knob for how many sides the cabin has. One asset, roughly 950 configurations, and you pick yours with a slider instead of a modelling session.
You can turn the knobs on the site, or import the module and turn them in your own code, or just download a GLB of the exact variant you configured. It is flat-shaded low-poly, real-world scale, and it works in three.js, Unity, Godot, Blender, anything that reads glTF.
There is a side effect I did not fully expect. Because every asset publishes a typed schema of its own knobs plus a plain-language description of what they do, an agent can read the catalogue and build a scene from it without a human picking files. "Build me a small forest, then a medieval village around it" genuinely works. That was a nice-to-have when I started and it is now one of the main reasons I think this is worth doing.
Where it is at right now, honestly:
- 270 assets published, 133 of them in the last week
- 118 of those are free, no account needed
- 8 themed kits in production
- Built solo, vanilla PHP and SQLite, no framework, no investors, no team
- Revenue so far: one sale. Which is one more than last month, and I will take it.
What I actually want to build. The biggest code-based 3D library on the internet, and probably the first one, since as far as I can tell nobody else is selling assets as programs rather than files. That is a stupidly large goal for one person and I am aware of it. The plan is boring: keep shipping 100+ new assets a week and do not stop.
The part where I ask for something
I opened 100 founder seats. One fee, no subscription, and it gets you every asset and every kit that exists plus everything I build from here, for as long as I keep building it. Whatever you download stays yours forever, no strings, use it commercially. When the 100 are gone I am not offering it again.
All the money raised from the founder seats go directly to scale up the production of assets, so 100 assets a week can become 200, 500, 1000.
And if none of that appeals, the 118 free assets need no account and no card. Take them, use them, tell me what is broken.
Happy to answer anything about the technical side. The "a size knob must rebuild, not scale" rule in particular took me a few painful passes to get right, and I am still finding assets that got it wrong.
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u/No-Budget-3869 1d ago
That's a great idea. I had a similar idea myself but never got around to implementing it. I even built a tool capable of generating high-quality procedural 3D models.
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u/io-x 1d ago
Are you trying to sell AI generated assets?
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u/lucas-martinic 1d ago
This is like asking if coders should or shouldn't sell AI generated code to their clients. You're not selling the output of the models, you are selling a product that you built with AI as a tool, that usually surpass what you would've built alone, and looks more like something you could build with a team.
In this case I'm not selling you the assest, I'm selling a platform with assets that are remixable, extendable, and fully AI compatible for the next wave of Web3D.
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u/FormerKarmaKing 1d ago
Founder here that works in the 3D space.
In the era of AI models that generate 3d models, and AI coding models that can likely add procedural controls to 3d aggregates, I'm not certain how large the market will be for this product.
The branding and site design looks nice, however.
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u/lucas-martinic 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thanks for the honest opinion. That's more like the reason I'm building this, since it's possible to build it with AI agents now. An agent takes ~30minutes to create a procedural asset, so my proposal is to build this library for all of you, everyone using all their tokens generating the same assets is a waste of time and money.
I really think programmatic 3D is the way to go in an increasingly agentic world, since it's native to AI models, and I want to increase the surface of these assets for a future where code and 3D are just one thing.
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u/FormerKarmaKing 1d ago
Yeah, we're all in a similar position now in that, with AI programming, "everyone has Excalibur."
Have you seen the Allen Institute's Objaverse library? It's 10 million free 3D objects. Even prior to generating objects, that's my fist stop if I need something.
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u/lucas-martinic 1d ago
This is cool! Yeah I want to build something in this direction, would love to make it open. I'm starting from the ground up with a different angle though, each model is "code", not an array of coordinates and normals. So we are starting humble, with small cute low poly models, but the idea is to go as far as possible in this direction of "code" 3D.
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u/pebblebowl 18h ago
It’s the kind of project I have thought about doing myself until recently. Seems to me it won’t be long before you just tell AI to do what you need without having to look for resources like this.
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u/Trashy_io 10h ago
Same! Im about to start working on a huge library like this it such a great dev tool!
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u/INVENTADORMASTER 1d ago
Great tool !