Every picture on this page was rendered by Heimdall3D from the original file.
NEW IN 1.1.0
Rig, animate, light and print
Version 1.1.0 adds rigging, motion capture, an animation dock, splat captures, lighting, volumes, print checks and scripts to the viewer.
01 · FIGURES
Rigging in seconds
A figure with no skeleton gets one, with skin weights and fingers on the hands.
Drag joints into place, pose them by hand, fold the fingers and paint weights with brushes.
Motion capture library
Clips from CMU and Quaternius retarget to any skeleton, with feet pinned where they touch the ground.
Repair motion mends spikes and bent-back knees. Several actors play at once, each on its own clock.
02 · ANIMATION
A time dock for animation
Range, transport, named rows and a graph editor sit along the bottom of the viewer window.
Key objects, cameras, lights and card settings, cut between cameras, and export .glb or .fbx with skeleton, weights and clips.
03 · CAPTURED PLACES
Gaussian splat captures
Captures of any size stream from disk while you look, nearest detail first.
Walk inside a capture with keys or an Xbox controller and jump between named places.
Try it with a capture from SuperSplat (superspl.at), where authors publish Gaussian splat captures. Heimdall3D opens .ply, .splat, .ksplat, .spz, .sog and the streamed .ssog. Download a capture and Heimdall3D opens the downloaded file.
- Trogir on SuperSplat: Get lost in the alleys of historical Trogir, Croatia, by Paolo Tosolini. The alleys of a Croatian town, captured with an XGRIDS PortalCam. The viewer opens standing inside it and you walk its streets.
- Double Arch on SuperSplat: Arches National Park - Double Arch, by AJ Creek. The Double Arch rock formation in Utah.
Both captures are licensed CC BY 4.0. Authors: Paolo Tosolini and AJ Creek.
04 · LIGHT AND AIR
Lights placed with a press
Every light a file carries lights the scene, up to 4096 at once.
Add a Point, Spot, Sun or Area light where the press meets the model, with up to 16 casting shadows.
Clouds and fire
OpenVDB and NanoVDB volumes show clouds lit by the sun and sky and fire glowing by its temperature.
Volume sequences play on the timeline beside your keys.
05 · 2D AND GAME ART
From 3D model to sprite sheet
Turn any model into a sprite sheet from 4, 8 or 16 directions, with every cell shown in the pane and lit by your scene.
Sheets export ready for Godot, TexturePacker, GameMaker and Aseprite, with directions and clips as named animations, plus normal, depth, occlusion and ID maps beside the colour. A pixel look sets 16 to 256 rows, a palette of 2 to 64 colours, dither and outline, and Aseprite, Tiled and LDtk files open directly.
06 · PRINTING
Checks for 3D printing
The Print section shows a model's size in millimetres and whether it fits one of 63 printers.
Fit to printer, show overhangs, check Health and Volume, lay flat, cut Layers and colour thin walls.
07 · SCRIPTS
Every scene is also a script
Heimdall3D writes any scene as a plain text script, a .h3ds file, that builds it again. The language was made for AI assistants.
A script's lines open and place models, add lights and cameras, key animation, set any card's controls by name, raise landscapes with erosion and surfaces, and scatter copies of a model across them. Save a scene with one command and it comes back identical: every object, placement, light, camera, setting and key. A script runs as one step of Undo. The Scripts card shows scripts as tiles with a picture of their last run. The notebook colours a script and runs it section by section. Templates such as three-point lighting, a product shot or a turntable run in one line.
An AI assistant reaches Heimdall3D through a control channel, from a shell or over MCP. With Take commands switched on, it drives the window you have open, each command happens on screen, and the Activity window shows what it did. Only programs under your own Windows account can send commands.
A script names a piece from the model library on heimdall3d.com as library:<author>/<collection>/<piece>, for example library:kenney/castle/wall. Heimdall3D fetches the piece once and keeps a copy, and a piece in a published collection stays there, so a script made of library pieces builds the same scene on every computer. Your own models travel with Send to Gulltopp, which hands the models, the script and a still to a collection on heimdall3d.com. Skirnir at heimdall3d.com/skirnir is the web side: people share a link to their work, and anyone who opens it views the work in the browser. A reader walks or flies through a 3D model and walks inside a splat capture. In Heimdall3D, Walk puts a body on the ground of a splat capture, with keys or an Xbox controller, and the free camera flies through any 3D scene.
THE COMMAND LINE
Drive Heimdall3D from a shell
Take commands on the Configure page lets these commands reach the open window.
heimdall3d_view.exe --call script run castle.h3dsRuns the script in the open Heimdall3D window and waits for it to finish.heimdall3d_view.exe --call run "Three-point lighting" #154Runs the shipped template on node #154: adds a key, a fill and a rim light aimed at it.heimdall3d_view.exe --call look --size 1280x720 --out castle.jpgWrites a picture of the view as it stands.An AI assistant that speaks MCP is pointed at heimdall3d_view.exe --mcp.
The castle built by the script. Press it to turn the castle in the browser.
A CASTLE FROM ONE SCRIPT
A castle from one script
One script of 136 lines builds a large castle from Kenney's Castle Kit (CC0). It has a curtain wall 21 metres a side with eight towers, a gatehouse, a keep of four towers with banners, siege engines before the gate and a wood around the walls.
Loops lay each run of wall, and one loop turns every wall named "Side wall".
THE CASTLE IN SEVEN SCRIPTS
The script ends by setting the sky, a grass floor and the scene's own camera.
NEW FORMATS
Formats added since 1.0
Six groups of files Heimdall3D 1.0 could not open.
Windows Explorer, upgraded for 3D
Every 3D model and HDR image in the folder draws its own thumbnail the same way. HDR images keep their floating point range, with exposure controls and the pixel value under the pointer. Nothing in the file is changed by looking at it.
Rendered by Heimdall3D
Its own renderer
Heimdall3D renders the file itself through Vulkan, on the GPU in the machine. Materials, textures, skinning, shadows, environment lighting and tone mapping are all its own. NVIDIA, AMD and Intel all work, and it ships as one binary.
The renderer runs in its own process, and Vulkan and the graphics driver never run inside Explorer. If it crashes, Explorer keeps running. That one thumbnail is not drawn, and the renderer starts again for the next file.
Light
An HDR environment map gives the model its light, colour and reflections. Up to three point lights can be added, each with a colour or Kelvin temperature and a size that sets its shadow's softness. Gobos, volumetric beams, one bounce of indirect light and light through coloured glass are on the same panel.
Thumbnails
A 350,000-triangle model renders in about 1.2 seconds on the test system, then comes from cache. Motion capture files show the mannequin in a representative pose. HDR, EXR and DDS files show their pixel size in the file list.
Formats
Models: glTF, GLB, VRM, FBX, OBJ, PLY, COLLADA, 3DS, 3MF, STL, USD, Alembic, VRML97, AMF.
Motion capture: BVH, and the animation inside FBX, glTF, USD and Alembic.
Gaussian splats: PLY, SPLAT, KSPLAT, SPZ, SOG and the streamed SSOG.
Voxels and volumes: OpenVDB, NanoVDB, MagicaVoxel, Qubicle, binvox, NRRD, OctoMap, SDF, MOL.
Print files: G-code, BGCODE, CTB, CBDDLP, Photon, GOO.
2D and game art: Aseprite, Tiled, LDtk.
Images: Radiance HDR and PIC, OpenEXR, PFM, DDS, KTX2 and Basis, TIFF.
A model format is listed only when its materials, textures, skeleton and animation load with it. PNG, JPEG, WebP and TGA decode inside a model and are left to Explorer as files, because Explorer draws those itself.
Share it on the web
Our viewer for the browser shows the same files on any web page, with guided tours: models, Gaussian splats, captured places and point clouds. See Skirnir →
Download Heimdall3D 1.1.1
Heimdall3D 1.1.1 runs on Windows 10 and 11.
The free version has thumbnails, the preview pane, the viewer window and every format. It needs no account or key, has no watermark and does not expire.
A licence is one payment of €49 including VAT and covers the 1.x line with updates. It adds eight actions: saving an image, copying a frame to the clipboard, writing a sprite sheet, recording a turntable or an animation clip, running a shot destination, automatic rigging, putting motion capture onto a character and exporting a model as GLB or FBX with skeleton, skin weights and clips. The export controls stay visible in the free version and say that they need a licence. What the price covers.
Download the Installer, 162 MB Download the ZIP, 186 MB
Installer or ZIP
Use the installer. It registers the thumbnail and preview handlers, removes any previous version, and on uninstall restores the handler another program had registered. The ZIP holds the same files and leaves registration to you.
Verify the download
Compare the SHA-256 before running the file.
Heimdall3D-1.1.1-setup.exe · 162 MB
4bda8478da432e603c69ff5be234eeeab5cf4c1f94bbd6d4e126ecae8d3c090a
Heimdall3D-1.1.1.zip · 186 MB
48a765b30aae92ab9d32d033d485bbe0d613a2b940e324aca4db58e1322ae5b1
In PowerShell:
Get-FileHash <file> -Algorithm SHA256
Do not run the file if the result differs.
Report a file that renders incorrectly
The most useful report is the file, or a screenshot and what it should look like.
Heimdall3D on the Microsoft Store
The Store build is the same Heimdall3D for Windows Explorer. It installs and updates itself. The price page explains the two channels.
Credits
Every picture on this page is a render of somebody else's model. Three are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, where the credit is a condition of use.
- “Stained Glass Lamp” © 2021 Wayfair (Eric Chadwick), CC BY 4.0.
- “Anisotropy Barn Lamp” © 2023 Wayfair, LLC (Eric Chadwick), CC BY 4.0.
- “Mosquito In Amber” © 2018 Loic Norgeot / Sketchfab, real-time refraction © 2019 Sketchfab, CC BY 4.0.
The rest are CC0: the brass goblets and the bronze whale by Tina, the gothic cabinet and both chandeliers by Kirill Sannikov, and the brass vase by Rico Cilliers, all from Poly Haven. The sci-fi helmet and the teacup are Khronos glTF Sample Assets. The light in every render is a Poly Haven HDRI. The floors are from Poly Haven and ambientCG. The mannequin is Quaternius's Universal Animation Library 2. The toolbar glyphs are Tabler Icons, MIT. Full credits.
The mailing list
One message goes out when a new build is released. Nothing else is sent, and the address is not shared.
Every message has an unsubscribe link. One press removes the address.
Questions
Why do my 3D models show as blank icons in Windows Explorer?
Windows has no built-in thumbnail support for most 3D formats. Microsoft's 3D Viewer covered a few and has been removed from new installations. Heimdall3D adds a thumbnail handler that renders glTF, GLB, VRM, FBX, OBJ, PLY, COLLADA, 3DS, 3MF, STL and BVH files directly, so the file list shows the model instead of a generic page icon. It uses its own renderer and does not depend on any Microsoft component.
Can Windows Explorer preview EXR and HDR files?
Not on its own. With Heimdall3D installed, EXR, Radiance HDR, PIC, PFM, DDS, KTX2, Basis and TIFF files get real thumbnails and open in the Explorer preview pane with exposure control in EV stops, tone-mapping options, gamma and channel isolation. The image is decoded in floating point, so raising the exposure recovers detail rather than stretching an already flattened picture.
Can I rotate a model in the Explorer preview pane?
Yes. The preview pane is an interactive viewer, not a still. You can orbit the camera, zoom, change the environment map and the floor, and play any animation the file carries.
Will installing it break the thumbnails another program already provides?
No. Where a file type already has a thumbnail handler from another application, the previous one is recorded before ours is registered and put back when Heimdall3D is uninstalled. A repeat install or an upgrade does not overwrite that record with our own handler, which is the case most likely to lose it.
If the pane says a file could harm your computer
The message comes from Windows. It marks every file you download, and it will not run any preview handler on a marked file. The thumbnail still renders and double-clicking still opens the file; only the preview pane is refused. To clear it on one file, right-click it, choose Properties, and tick Unblock. To clear a whole folder, run this in PowerShell: Get-ChildItem "C:\path\to\folder" -Recurse | Unblock-File. Most models downloaded from an asset site arrive marked.
Why does a .gltf file with separate textures not open in the preview pane?
Windows gives a preview handler the contents of the selected file and never tells it where the file lives, so nothing stored beside it can be found. A .gltf that keeps its geometry in a .bin file, or its textures as separate images, therefore cannot be assembled inside the pane. Use .glb, which carries everything in one file, or double-click to open the model in the viewer window, which has the path and no such limit.