3D inspector

The 3D inspector opens a 3D file to see what is inside it before you use it: how its parts are arranged, how heavy it is, what its materials and textures are. It runs in your browser, and the file is not sent anywhere.

It is part of the Silver and Gold plans. Signed in on one of them, open it from the bitbybit.dev menu, or go to bitbybit.dev/3d-inspector.

Open a file

Drop a .glb, .gltf or .stl file on the view, or press Browse files. Files up to 500 MB open. The camera frames the model; press Zoom to Fit to frame it again at any time.

What the toolbar does

Button	What it does
Open File	opens another file
Zoom to Fit	frames the whole model
Show Environment, Show Ground	adds a sky that metals reflect, and a ground under the model
wireframe	turns a wireframe on over the faces, then shows the wireframe only, then off again; its colour and thickness can be set
Explode parts	pulls the parts away from each other, by a slider
Show Scene Tree	opens the scene panel
Background color	changes the colour behind the model
Model up axis	stands a Z-up model upright with Z
opacity slider	makes the model see-through, to look inside
Fullscreen	gives the view the whole screen

Click a part to highlight it; click it again to bring the camera to it.

The scene panel

Model Info counts the model's triangles, vertices, meshes, instances, nodes, materials and textures, lists every texture with its size, and warns about what makes a model slow on the web: 2 million triangles or more, 500 meshes or more, textures of 4096 pixels or more, or 32 textures or more.

The hierarchy lists every node with its kind and triangle count. Focus the camera on one, or hide and show it with its eye. A file with material variants (KHR_materials_variants) lists them under Material Variants, to switch between them.

The inspector shows; it does not change or export the file, and it does not play animations.