What is aerie?

Aerie is a browser based 3D renderer that tries to recreate the look and feel of Bryce 2, an old rendering program from 1996, but built with modern web technology. You can import today's 3D file formats, glTF, FBX, OBJ, Collada, 3MF, 3DS, STL, and PLY, and render them with a soft, dreamy, ray traced style similar to that older software. The project runs entirely in your web browser using WebGPU, a newer browser technology for fast graphics and computation. It gives you two ways to view a scene: a quick, real time preview built on the popular Three.js library for editing, and a separate, slower path traced renderer written in WGSL (WebGPU's shader language) that produces the final, polished image with realistic reflections, refractions, soft shadows, and depth of field. Beyond importing your own models, Aerie can build procedural worlds from scratch. You can shape terrain, adjust the sky with a sun and moving clouds across a full day and night cycle, add reflective water, and control render settings like exposure and haze, all with live editing panels. There is also a scatter tool for populating landscapes with repeated objects like rocks or plants, and basic tools for editing meshes and combining shapes. The built in editor includes a scene list, an inspector panel, viewport picking, drag to move objects, undo and redo, and its own save file format. For animation, Aerie supports a keyframe timeline for camera moves, plus turntable and cutscene rendering that exports finished animations as WebM video files. To run it yourself, you need a browser that supports WebGPU, such as a recent Chrome, Edge, or Firefox Nightly, then use standard npm commands to install dependencies and start a local development server. This is a small, single contributor project with just one star, so it should be seen as an experimental, hobbyist tool rather than a mature production renderer.