Nightmesh

View and inspect glTF and GLB 3D models in VS Code, in your dark theme.

Nightmesh is a fast, offline, view-only viewer for glTF models (.glb, and .gltf with its .bin files and textures). It shows the model in a 3D view that follows your color theme, and next to it what the file holds: its node tree, meshes, materials, textures and animations, how many triangles it draws and how big it is in metres. The structure is there as soon as the file opens, before the geometry has loaded, even for files of hundreds of megabytes.

Preview. glTF and GLB open today. OBJ, STL, PLY and 3D Tiles are planned.

Why Nightmesh

• Structure first. The node tree, the inspector and the statistics show right away, read from the file's JSON. You can find your way around a large model while its geometry is still loading, and also in a model that can't be drawn.
• Inspect, not just look. Click a part to see which node it is, where it sits in the hierarchy, its transform, mesh, materials and size in metres. Follow the links from a mesh to its materials and textures, and count what the scene puts on the GPU.
• Point an AI assistant at a part. Right-click a part and choose Copy Reference to get models/robot.glb, node "Arm" (nodes[12]), under Root › Body on the clipboard, ready to paste into a chat with Claude Code or any assistant that works in your workspace.
• Offline and private. The Draco, meshopt and KTX2 decoders and the lighting ship with the extension. No network access, no CDN, no telemetry.
• View-only. Your model files are never written to.

Features

The 3D view

• Orbit, pan and zoom with the mouse. The model is framed when it opens and keeps your view when the file changes on disk.
• Look from the front, right or top with the View menu or the number keys 1, 3 and 7, as in Blender, and from the other side with Shift. 5 switches between perspective and orthographic. An axes gizmo shows which way X, Y and Z point; click an axis to look along it.
• Look through the cameras saved in the model, with their field of view.
• A ground grid in squares of a power of ten metres, sized to the model, the world's axes and the model's bounding box. The background can follow your theme or be dark, neutral or light.
• The size of the model, or of what is selected, in metres in the corner of the view.
• Models are lit by a built-in environment, so they look right without any setup.
• Draco and meshopt compressed meshes, quantized models and KTX2 (Basis Universal) textures open too. Their decoders load only when a model needs them.

Structure and inspector

• The Structure panel lists the scenes and node hierarchy, then the meshes, materials, textures, animations, skins, cameras and lights. It stays fast with tens of thousands of nodes.
• The Inspector shows what is selected: a node's transform and mesh, a mesh's primitives, vertices and attributes, material values with color swatches, texture size, mip levels and GPU memory with a preview of the image, animation channels and more, with links between them.
• What is selected is outlined in the 3D view: a node, every node that uses a mesh, every part drawn with a material. Click the model to select what is under the pointer, and the tree opens to it. Frame Selection (F, or a double-click) brings it into view.

Statistics

• The Statistics tab counts the scene that is shown, before its geometry loads: nodes, mesh instances, draw calls, vertices, triangles, materials, textures, estimated texture memory and the scene's dimensions.
• A table of meshes, sorted by the triangles they put on screen, finds the heavy ones. Click a name to select the mesh and see where it is drawn.
• For a model with animations: how many clips, the longest, channels, keyframes and the nodes they move.

Shading and materials

• The Shading menu draws the model lit as its materials say, unlit in their base colors and textures, or colored by the direction its surfaces face, to check normals. A wireframe can be drawn over any of them.
• Models with material variants (KHR_materials_variants) switch between them from the same menu.
• Physically based materials with their Khronos extensions: clearcoat, sheen, transmission, volume, iridescence, anisotropy, dispersion, specular, IOR, emissive strength, bump and unlit. Textures can be PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF or KTX2.

Animations

• Play a model's animations from a bar below the view: pick a clip, play and pause (Space), scrub the time line and change the speed.
• A clip whose keyframes move nothing, as some exporters write them, is marked as such, so a model that doesn't move isn't mistaken for a viewer problem.

Everywhere

• Copy Reference in the right-click menu, for a part in the view, a row in the structure or a link in the inspector. Copy Reference with Details adds what the inspector says about it. Both are in the Command Palette too, where they refer to the selection.
• Earlier versions from Git (the Timeline, Source Control, a comparison) open as they were committed, including models kept in Git LFS whose content is on this machine.
• Live reload that keeps your view when the file is saved.
• Files that can't be shown say why. When only part of a model can be loaded, such as a missing .bin or texture, the rest is drawn and a note lists what was left out.
• A model larger than 1 GB waits for Draw Model before it's loaded into the view; its structure and statistics show right away.
• Dark, light and high contrast themes.
• Keyboard and screen reader support.
• English and Turkish.

Getting started

1. Install Nightmesh from the Visual Studio Marketplace or, in VSCodium and other editors that use it, Open VSX. Or search for "Nightmesh" in the Extensions view.
2. Open a .glb or .gltf file. Nightmesh is the default viewer for these files.

If another extension also opens these files, right-click the file and choose Open With… › Nightmesh, then Configure default editor. Or add this to your settings:

"workbench.editorAssociations": {
  "*.glb": "nightmesh.viewer",
  "*.gltf": "nightmesh.viewer"
}

Mouse and keyboard

The number keys work on the main keyboard and the number pad. Nightmesh doesn't use Ctrl shortcuts in the view, so VS Code's own stay as they are.

Limitations

• Only glTF 2.0 is supported for now: OBJ, STL, PLY and 3D Tiles are planned. So are a glTF Validator report and a breakdown of where a file's bytes go.
• Models that require KHR_materials_pbrSpecularGlossiness or KHR_node_visibility can't be drawn yet; Nightmesh says so and still shows their structure.
• One animation clip plays at a time.
• A .gltf's .bin files and textures are read only from the model's folder and workspace: never from the network or an absolute path.
• Nightmesh needs desktop VS Code: it isn't available in VS Code for the Web yet.

Contributing

Bug reports and ideas are welcome in issues. See CONTRIBUTING.md to build and test the extension.

License

MIT. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, along with the credits for the models in the screenshots above, from the Khronos glTF Sample Assets.