Needle Engine is a fast web engine for complex and simple 3D applications alike.
It is flexible, extensible and has built-in support for collaboration and XR! It is built around the glTF standard for 3D assets and is using three.js under the hood - so all your existing knowledge applies.

→ 📑 Documentation
→ 💎 Samples
→ 🏓 Changelog

Features

• Components System: Add your custom components with easy
• WebXR support & iOS Quicklook support for interactive AR
• Networking is built-in
• Advanced PBR Rendering
• Animate Everything
• Animation Statemachines & Timeline Animations
• Lightmaps
• Physics
• Postprocessing
• Texture & Mesh LOD Generation
• Progressive Texture and Mesh Loading
  Higher resolution assets are loaded on demand
• Dynamic Content Loading & Multi-Scene support
• Integrations for Unity or Blender
• Commercial & Educational Licenses
• ↪ more features

Editor Integrations

Powerful integrations for Unity and Blender allow artists and developers to collaborate and manage web applications inside battle-tested 3d editors. Needle Engine integrations allow you to use editor features for exporting models, author materials, animate and sequence animations, bake lightmaps and more.

• 🎲 Download Unity Integration
• 🐵 Download Blender Integration
• 📜 Code only

Getting Started

Follow the Getting Started Guide to download and install Needle Engine or try one of our samples ⚡

Examples

Custom loading overlay & wait for LODs | Code on Stackblitz

Motors & More Shop Example with React | Code on Stackblitz

Postprocessing Effects with custom Magnifier effect | Code on Stackblitz

AR Restaurant Example | Code on Github

Camera Focus DIV Example 1 | Code on Stackblitz

Camera Focus DIV Example 2 | Code on Stackblitz

👋 Find more examples on samples.needle.tools, docs.needle.tools and in the Needle Engine Stackblitz Collection

Contact ✒️

🌵 Needle • Github • Twitter • Discord • Forum • Youtube

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Recent Changes

[4.8.8] - 2025-08-29

• Fix: iOS AR image tracking bug where having multiple WebXRImageTracking components in the scene cause unexpected behaviour or invalid USDZ files
• Fix: DropListener loadFromURL now returns the promise to make awaiting the loaded asset much easier
• Fix: Issue where <needle-engine autoplay> would play animations faster than expected
• Change: OrbitControls with locked target constraint is now updating the constraint position when calling e.g. setTargetPosition
• Add: setCameraFocusRect method on Needle Context for easier responsive layouting.
  With this you can e.g. overlay the webgl scene with HTML elements and pass in a div element for keeping important elements visible.
  Example 1 Website | Code on Stackblitz
  
  Example 2 Website | Code on Stackblitz
  

[4.8.7] - 2025-08-27

• Add: New @needle-tools/three-animation-pointer package
• Add: loadPMREM(<url>) function

[4.8.6] - 2025-08-20

• Bump three dependency to fix issue caused by KTX2Exporter

[4.8.5] - 2025-08-20

• Add: Much faster loading for skyboxes and environment maps when using presets. E.g. <needle-engine environment-image="studio"></needle-engine>. Supported values are studio, blurred-skybox, quicklook, quicklook-ar
• Change: TransformControls now also enable fastMode on the SyncedTransform component
• Change: The mobile javascript console now needs to be explictly enabled using the ?console flag. This change has been made to improve the local development experience. Previously the javascript console would be initialized in local development environments but stay invisible until e.g. an error would be detected. This did sometimes cause performance issues when very large objects would be logged in development

For all changes visit Github Releases