3d-asset-server queries twenty 3D asset libraries at once for AI agents

Finding a free 3D model usually means opening five or six sites one by one and comparing their results against the licence terms on each page. 3d-asset-server, a 5-day-old Apache-2.0 Node.js project by GitHub user arielshad, searches twenty libraries in one call and gives the result back to a coding agent as a merged, ranked list.

The repository is at arielshad/3d-asset-server and had 269 stars at the time of this item. The project was created on 4 October and has been pushed every day since. The README describes the server as "3d assets api and mcp": it exposes a REST API with an OpenAPI 3.1 schema and an MCP server a coding agent calls directly.

What it searches, and what it hands back

Twenty asset sites are grouped into three sets. Eleven use the site's own API, including Poly Haven, ambientCG, BlenderKit, Polyfork, 3DAssets.dev, TextureCan and HDRMaps. Six are scraped, including Kenney and Quaternius. Three are link-only, Fab, Poliigon and TurboSquid, because their bot detection blocks a scraper and the server returns a link for a human to open. Every result shows its licence in the response, so an agent can filter by Creative Commons Zero or by a licence that requires attribution before it downloads anything. Paid and login-gated content is not fetched.

Four tools are exposed over MCP: search_assets to query across providers, get_asset to pull a result's full metadata, download_asset to save the file to a chosen folder, and list_providers to see which sites are up. Downloads pick a format for the asset type, GLB first for models, falling back to glTF, FBX, OBJ or Blend. Textures prefer JPG, then PNG. HDRIs prefer HDR, then EXR. Companion files travel with the asset so a scene opens with no missing textures.

The design choice behind the pitch

The project is written against the design choice that a coding agent is now the right surface for a one-shot search. A 3D artist working inside Claude Code or Cursor can ask for "a low-poly tree" or "a brushed-metal texture" and the server returns a merged list of twenty libraries, with the licence beside each entry and a direct download that drops a usable file into the project. The maintainer calls it an alternative to opening a browser tab for each site.

Security guards are stated plainly. The server rejects zip-slip paths inside archives, blocks requests to private IP ranges, and holds a per-asset size cap so an agent cannot be told to download a 2 GB pack by a bad link. The three link-only sites return a link in the response, so an agent routes the user to a browser tab for those sites instead of attempting a download. The license handling is first class: the server preserves attribution on every result that asks for it, and the README states in one sentence that the project finds and fetches assets whose rights belong to their authors.

Source

The repository is at arielshad/3d-asset-server under the Apache-2.0 licence.