codepawl/nasa-3d-glb

NASA 3D Resources as GLB

NASA's free 3D models of spacecraft, rovers, telescopes, suits and asteroids, rebuilt as web, game and engine ready GLB with LODs, a phone tier and collision hulls.

Not endorsed by NASA. NASA is credited as the source of these models; this pack is CodePawl's repackaging. The NASA insignia (meatball), logotype and other identifiers that appear on some models (logo or patch textures on Argo, Constellation-X, Extravehicular Mobility Unit, Mark III Spacesuit, Space Shuttle Parts Payload and Voyager Probe (A)) stay NASA's and are protected by law: do not use them to suggest NASA endorsement, and read the NASA Images and Media Usage Guidelines before any commercial use.

256 models from NASA 3D Resources by NASA, 606.9 MB of source files packed into 262.1 MB of GLB (web tier). Credit: NASA 3D Resources (https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources), NASA and its contributors.

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

Files

Folder	Size	What	For
objects/	262.1 MB	meshopt geometry, WebP textures	three.js, Babylon.js, any glTF viewer with the meshopt decoder
objects_ktx2/	138.6 MB	meshopt, KTX2 textures (ETC1S colour, UASTC normals), mipmaps	WebGPU and WebGL games: textures stay compressed on the GPU
lods/	606.5 MB	three simplified levels: 50, 20 and 6 % of the triangles	distance LOD, crowds, far props
mobile/	198.1 MB	25 % of the triangles, textures at most 512 px in KTX2	phones and light laptops
engine/	1.25 GB	no meshopt, no quantization	Blender and desktop engines that cannot decode meshopt
collision/	0.8 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)	0.3 MB	5.4 MiB	28,436	481 ms	0.9 ms	9 ms
ktx2 (6)	0.4 MB	2.0 MiB	20,014	574 ms	0.7 ms	14 ms
lod2 (12)	0.1 MB	0.5 MiB	14,494	279 ms	0.8 ms	5 ms
mobile (12)	0.1 MB	0.6 MiB	14,745	298 ms	1.0 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/nasa-3d-glb/resolve/main/objects_ktx2/70-meter-dish/70-meter-dish.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/nasa-3d-glb/resolve/main/objects/70-meter-dish/70-meter-dish.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] });

loadGltf refuses files over 32 MiB or 2 million vertices by default, and the largest files here pass that, so add maxBytes: 256 * 1024 * 1024, maxVertices: 8_000_000 next to decoders for those.

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.

After upload, all 2,165 files on this repository matched the tested local files by sha256, and every tier of 24 items was loaded again from https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/nasa-3d-glb/resolve/main: three.js WebGL 175/175, three.js WebGPU 175/175, 67js 96/175.

Tier	three.js WebGL	three.js WebGPU	67js
web	256/256	254/256	162/256
ktx2	112/112	110/112	77/112
lod1	256/256	254/256	162/256
lod2	256/256	256/256	162/256
lod3	256/256	255/256	162/256
mobile	256/256	256/256	162/256
engine	256/256	254/256	160/256
collision	256/256	256/256	164/256

Blender 5.2 import: engine 256/256, objects 256/256, collision 256/256.

The 67js misses are 67js limits, not broken files: about 90 models are in large units (centimetres from FBX, a few hundred units across) and 67js 0.15.0 draws nothing at that scale, and a few hit its texture or transform checks (codepawl/67.js#481). Scale the asset down or use three.js for those. Cluster II and Ulysses carry wire booms 70 to 90 m long, so WebGPU draws their bodies at a few pixels when framed whole.

Licence and credit

NASA 3D Resources (https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources), NASA and its contributors. Licence: public-domain (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/).

Changes made: 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 NASA published them.

Source: https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3D-Resources at commit 11ebb4ee043715aefbba6aeec8a61746fad67fa7. Packed by CodePawl.