codepawl/smithsonian-3d-glb

Smithsonian Open Access 3D as GLB

The Smithsonian's CC0 3D scans, from the Apollo 11 command module and the 1903 Wright Flyer to fossils, skulls, shells and portraits, rebuilt as web, game and engine ready GLB with LODs, a phone tier and collision hulls.

Not endorsed by the Smithsonian Institution. The 3D models are Smithsonian Open Access content marked CC0, credited to the Smithsonian Institution and its museums; this pack is CodePawl's repackaging. CC0 covers copyright only: the Smithsonian name and logo, and any third-party trademarks, publicity or privacy rights in an object, are not licensed here (see the Smithsonian Terms of Use).

3451 objects from Smithsonian Open Access 3D by Smithsonian, 22.31 GB of source files packed into 4.97 GB of GLB (web tier). Credit: Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Open Access (https://www.si.edu/openaccess, https://3d.si.edu): 3D scans by the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office and the owning museums.

Viewer: https://huggingface.co/spaces/codepawl/smithsonian-3d-glb-viewer

Files

Folder	Size	What	For
objects/	4.97 GB	meshopt geometry, WebP textures	three.js, Babylon.js, any glTF viewer with the meshopt decoder
objects_ktx2/	6.44 GB	meshopt, KTX2 textures (ETC1S colour, UASTC normals), mipmaps	WebGPU and WebGL games: textures stay compressed on the GPU
lods/	4.70 GB	three simplified levels: 50, 20 and 6 % of the triangles	distance LOD, crowds, far props
mobile/	1.51 GB	25 % of the triangles, textures at most 512 px in KTX2	phones and light laptops
engine/	17.02 GB	no meshopt, no quantization	Blender and desktop engines that cannot decode meshopt
collision/	10.9 MB	convex collision shapes, plain glTF	Rapier, Jolt, PhysX, Unity colliders

metadata.jsonl has one line per item: title, kind, licence, authors, triangle count and the path and size of every tier. Thumbnails are in thumbs/.

For web games and WebGPU

Load the objects_ktx2/ files for games: KTX2 textures stay block-compressed on the GPU (BC7 on desktop, ASTC or ETC2 on phones), so they take a fraction of the memory of decoded WebP. Switch to lods/ by distance and to mobile/ on phones. collision/ holds convex shapes for physics.

Measured on 12 items spread over triangle count. Phone page: 390x844 at 3x, pixel ratio capped at 2, CPU throttled 4x, network at Chrome's Fast 4G (150 ms, 9 Mbit/s), so phone load includes the download. The GPU is a desktop RTX 3060 and is not throttled: frame time shows the CPU side only, a real phone GPU is slower. VRAM is geometry plus texture bytes on the GPU.

Tier	File (median)	VRAM (median)	Triangles	Phone load (4G)	Frame time	WebGPU load (local)
web (12)	1.4 MB	46.0 MiB	150,000	1484 ms	0.4 ms	37 ms
ktx2 (12)	2.1 MB	10.0 MiB	150,000	2013 ms	0.5 ms	31 ms
lod2 (12)	0.4 MB	3.4 MiB	29,988	498 ms	0.3 ms	9 ms
mobile (12)	0.5 MB	1.2 MiB	37,490	593 ms	0.3 ms	5 ms

three.js WebGPU:

import * as THREE from 'three';
import { WebGPURenderer } from 'three/webgpu';
import { GLTFLoader } from 'three/addons/loaders/GLTFLoader.js';
import { KTX2Loader } from 'three/addons/loaders/KTX2Loader.js';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'three/addons/libs/meshopt_decoder.module.js';

const renderer = new WebGPURenderer({ antialias: true });
await renderer.init(); // KTX2Loader needs to know which compressed formats this device takes
const ktx2 = new KTX2Loader().setTranscoderPath('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0.187.0/examples/jsm/libs/basis/').detectSupport(renderer);
const loader = new GLTFLoader().setKTX2Loader(ktx2).setMeshoptDecoder(MeshoptDecoder);
const gltf = await loader.loadAsync('https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/smithsonian-3d-glb/resolve/main/objects_ktx2/1903-wright-flyer-d8c62e5e/1903-wright-flyer-d8c62e5e.glb');

Use it in 67js

67js loads these files as they are:

npm install 67js@npm:@codepawlhq/67js meshoptimizer

import { Renderer67 } from '67js';
import { loadGltf } from '67js/addons/gltf';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'meshoptimizer';

const asset = await loadGltf('https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/smithsonian-3d-glb/resolve/main/objects/1903-wright-flyer-d8c62e5e/1903-wright-flyer-d8c62e5e.glb', { decoders: { meshopt: MeshoptDecoder } });
const renderer = new Renderer67(document.querySelector('canvas'), asset.parts, { ground: true });
renderer.render({ eye: [1.5, 1.2, 2], target: [0, 0.5, 0] });

Tested

Every file was loaded and drawn (drawn pixels counted) in each engine, three.js 0.187.0 and 67js 0.15.0, files from a local copy of this repository.

Tier	three.js WebGL	three.js WebGPU	67js
web	3451/3451	3451/3451	3448/3451
ktx2	3450/3450	3450/3450	3447/3450
lod1	3451/3451	3451/3451	3448/3451
lod2	3451/3451	3451/3451	3448/3451
lod3	3451/3451	3451/3451	3448/3451
mobile	3451/3451	3451/3451	3448/3451
engine	3451/3451	3451/3451	3395/3451
collision	3451/3451	3451/3451	3447/3451

Blender 5.2 import: engine 3451/3451, objects 3451/3451, collision 3451/3451.

Licence and credit

Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Open Access (https://www.si.edu/openaccess, https://3d.si.edu): 3D scans by the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office and the owning museums. Licence: CC0-1.0 (https://www.si.edu/termsofuse).

Changes made: Draco decoded, textures resized and recompressed (WebP, KTX2), meshes welded and meshopt-compressed, LODs, a mobile tier, an uncompressed engine tier and convex collision hulls added. Geometry and materials are otherwise as the Smithsonian published them.

Source: https://3d.si.edu. Packed by CodePawl.