Peek3D

Drop a 3D file. Look at it.

A tiny, native macOS viewer for glTF, FBX, OBJ, USD, STL and more — no editing, no export, no account. Free and open source.

Website · Install · Formats · Features · Privacy · Build · Known limits

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Install

brew install --cask deeeemiss/tap/peek3d

Or download the DMG from Releases. Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Requires macOS 13 or later.

Formats

Loader	Formats	Animation
GLTFKit2 (SPM)	.glb .gltf, incl. Draco geometry and KTX2/BasisU textures	Skeletal (skinned) + node-transform
ufbx (vendored)	.fbx	Node-transform + skinning + blend shapes
Apple Model I/O	.obj .stl .usd .usdz .usda .usdc .dae .ply .abc	—

All three converge into one SCNScene, so the viewer, wireframe, shading modes, and stats never need to know where a model came from.

glTF compression: KHR_draco_mesh_compression geometry is decoded with Draco (via the DracoSwift package, wired into GLTFKit2 by Peek3D/Draco/); KHR_texture_basisu textures (KTX2 with BasisLZ or UASTC) are transcoded by GLTFKit2's own libktx.

Features

Viewing

• Drag & drop (empty state and to replace a loaded model), or file picker
• Camera orbit / pan / zoom, fit-to-view
• Colored XYZ axis gizmo (bottom-right), click an axis to snap the camera
• Fullscreen toggle
• Viewport screenshot → PNG

Shading

• Default — the file's own materials/textures
• Normals — color-coded view-space normals
• Matcap — procedural matcap by view-space normal
• Unlit — base colour only, no lighting
• UV checker — procedural checkerboard on the real UVs
• Wireframe overlay, readable in every shading mode above

Lighting

• Default / Studio / Outdoor / Dark mood presets

Animation

• Timeline with play / pause, drag-to-seek and clip selection for animated .glb/.gltf (skinned) and .fbx (node-transform) models
• Wireframe stays correct while an animation plays

Info

• Triangles, vertices, meshes, materials, bounding-box size, file size, file name

Localization

• 11 languages: English (primary), Italiano, Español, Français, Deutsch, Português (Brasil), Русский, العربية, 日本語, 한국어, 简体中文.
• Follows the system language by default; pick another one in Peek3D ▸ Settings ▸ General.

Settings

• Starting shading, lighting and background for new windows
• Grid, model info panel and animation autoplay on open

Privacy

Peek3D makes no network connections and collects no data. Files you open are read locally and never leave your Mac.

Build

Needs Xcode (free on the Mac App Store) — no Apple certificate or developer account.

git clone https://github.com/deeeemiss/Peek3D.git
cd Peek3D
./scripts/run.sh

It builds a universal Release app into build/ and opens it. Or open Peek3D.xcodeproj in Xcode and hit Run.

Sandbox

The app runs sandboxed with the User Selected File (Read Only) entitlement. Files opened via drag & drop or the file picker get security-scoped access automatically; arbitrary paths are (by design) denied. External textures referenced by an .fbx/.gltf file (not embedded) need that access too — the app prompts for folder access and retries automatically if it's missing.

Known limits

• Draco-compressed geometry is supported for triangle lists only (what the glTF extension is for). A file with a damaged or undecodable Draco stream is refused with an error as a whole, never shown half-loaded. Other glTF compression, such as EXT_meshopt_compression, is GLTFKit2's business and untested here.
• FBX skinning and blend shapes are supported (SCNSkinner / SCNMorpher, weights animated by the clip), with limits: at most 4 bone influences per vertex (the heaviest 4, renormalised), linear blend skinning only (dual quaternion skinning falls back to linear), blend-shape in-between shapes are ignored (only each channel's final shape is used), and the camera fit uses the bind pose, so a strongly deforming model can leave the frame.

License

MIT. Third-party attributions are listed in the same file and in the app (Peek3D ▸ Open Source Licenses…). The fox in the screenshot and demo is the glTF sample "Fox" (CC BY 4.0, PixelMannen / @tomkranis); test model credits are in testmodels/README.md and tests/fixtures/README.md.