A Mini Software for Creating 3D Designs in the Browser

Professional 3D software is impressive, but also intimidating: hundreds of buttons, shortcuts and hours of tutorials before you get something nice. Often what we need is much simpler: a 3D illustration for an icon, a cover or a presentation. For that, I built a small tool into my portfolio: Minimalist 3D Design.

What it does

It’s a small editor that runs in the browser, with nothing to install. You pick basic shapes, like boxes, cylinders, ellipses, rectangles and polygons, place them, resize and recolor them, and combine them into your design. With the mouse you rotate the scene and see it from any angle.

The style: flat 3D

The tool uses a style called “flat 3D”: objects with volume, but flat colors and no realistic shadows. It’s the look of many modern illustrations, ideal for websites, apps and social media. It’s built on Zdog, a library designed precisely for this kind of light, friendly design.

The practical side

• Undo and redo, like any editor.
• Export to SVG: the design comes out as a vector image, sharp at any size and ready for a website or further editing in another program.
• Export the code: if you’re a developer, you can take the design as code and animate it on your own site.

Why a “mini software”

It doesn’t try to compete with Blender. Its value is the opposite: it does few things, but it does them fast and with no learning curve. It’s part of a set of tools I’ve been adding to the portfolio, like the favicon generator, the WebP converter and the palette generator, meant to solve specific everyday tasks.

Try it

It’s in the portfolio’s tools section, on the workbench in the 3D room. It’s free and runs right in the browser.