3D Engine | Real 3D Models from Sketchfab and Blender, in Vanilla Minecraft

What is it?
Download a model from Sketchfab, export one from Blender, or use one you already have. Drop the .glb, .gltf or .obj file into plugins/3DEngine/models/, run /3d reload, and it is in your world: the real mesh, with its own textures and animations. No blocky remake, no texture squashed onto cubes.

Furniture and decorations, statues and trophies, cars and creatures, props for a map or a lobby. If it is a 3D file, it can be a thing players walk up to, click on and sit in.

Players need nothing installed. 3D Engine builds the resource pack from your models and sends it to them as they join.

What a model can do

• ✔ Animate: every animation in the file becomes a state (idle, walk, run, open), with smooth blends between them that you set up in a few lines of YAML.
• ✔ Be clicked and hit: hitboxes are fitted to the model, a row of them along a long one, or you draw your own. Plugins hear every click and every blow.
• ✔ Be sat in: give a model seats and players right-click to sit down. A seat can ride a moving part of the model.
• ✔ Be driven: give it a drive: block and whoever sits in the driver's seat steers it where they look, sprints and jumps.
• ✔ Look at players: the whole model turns to face whoever comes near, or with a head bone only the head turns, on its neck, while the rest keeps animating.
• ✔ Be solid: placed models can fill their space with barriers, so nobody walks through a statue.
• ✔ Be held: any model can be an item in a player's hand.
• ✔ Stay put: placed models are saved with the world and come back after a restart.

A model
plugins/3DEngine/models/furniture/armchair.glb, and beside it armchair.yml:
/3d reload, then /3d place furniture/armchair. Every key is optional: a file with no .yml at all comes in at its own size with its animations ready to play.

For developers
Spawn models, play their states, find where a bone is on any frame, seat riders, make them look at things, and give them legs that walk your world.
Events: ModelInteractEvent, ModelDamageEvent, ModelMountEvent, ModelDismountEvent, ModelStateChangeEvent, ModelSpawnEvent and ModelRemoveEvent.

Commands

Command	What it does	Permission
/3d list	Every model, and any that failed to load	3dengine.list
/3d place <model> [scale]	Put one down where you look	3dengine.place.command
/3d give <model> [player]	An item that places the model	3dengine.give (and 3dengine.give.others for another player)
/3d remove, scale, rotate, state	Change the model you look at	3dengine.remove, .scale, .rotate, .state
/3d sit [seat]	Sit in the model you look at	3dengine.sit
/3d info [model]	Size, states, seats, hitboxes	3dengine.info
/3d quality [model] [triangles]	How much detail a model keeps	3dengine.quality
/3d effect <name> [size]	Put down a shader effect	3dengine.effect
/3d reload	Load the models folder again	3dengine.reload
/3d pack	Send yourself the pack again	3dengine.pack

Every command has its own permission, all op by default, so you can hand out just the ones you want. 3dengine.admin grants them all, plus placing with a model item ( 3dengine.place).

Right-clicking a model with seats sits you down ( 3dengine.ride, everyone by default).

Installing

1. Drop 3DEngine.jar into plugins/ on a Spigot or Paper server for Minecraft 26.3 and start it.
2. Nothing else: the pack is uploaded to our free pack host and players download it from there. A pack over 95 MB is served by your server instead: then open port 8163 and set pack.url to the address players reach it on.
3. Put model files in plugins/3DEngine/models/ and run /3d reload.

Already sending your own pack? Turn off pack.send and merge plugins/3DEngine/pack.zip into yours.

What it connects to

• Usage count. Every 30 seconds the plugin sends resourcepack.ai a random id that it made up the first time it started, how many players are online (a single number), and the names of any installed plugins that depend on 3D Engine, so we know how many servers and players use it. It is anonymous: no address, server name, version, player names or UUIDs, or content. Turn it off with telemetry: false.
• The resource pack. 3D Engine runs a small web server on the port above that hands out its resource pack, and only the pack. Turn it off with pack.host: false.

Support
Ask on Discord. Please don't post bugs in the reviews; we can't reply there, and we would rather fix it.

Made by ResourcePack AI
3D Engine comes from resourcepack.ai, a web editor for resource packs. Models are drawn with obj³'s shaders (MIT). The Labrador in the picture is "Labrador Dog" by kenchoo, after "Dog" by all of life (both CC BY 4.0); he comes with 3D Pets.