Why I Built Land of Assets
3D on the web has exploded. The infrastructure to support it hasn't kept up. Here's why I built Land of Assets to fix that.
Ben Houston • February 2, 2026 • 3 min read
If you've built anything serious with Three.js or Babylon.js, you've hit the wall.
It usually starts the same way. Your project is going well. You've got a few GLBs checked into Git alongside your code, which seems reasonable. Then the repo grows. CI takes longer. A new teammate clones the project and waits fifteen minutes while Git downloads 800MB of binary files they'll never touch. You add Git LFS, fight with its storage limits, realize your .gitattributes isn't tracking everything, and eventually wonder why managing your assets feels harder than writing the actual application.
3D assets are an afterthought in most development stacks. Every other part of the stack has mature tooling. Your code has Git. Your images have Cloudinary. Your fonts have Google Fonts. Your 3D models have... S3? Git LFS? A folder on someone's laptop?
Why the existing options don't work#
The solutions that exist today were built for different jobs.
Git and Git LFS are designed for code. Binary assets have no diffs, no meaningful history, and no concept of "optimization." They sit there, bloating your repo and slowing down everyone who doesn't need them.
Raw S3 buckets are general-purpose storage. They'll hold your files, but they have no idea what a GLB is. They don't generate previews, validate file structure, understand versioning semantics, or make it easy to give an artist access without also giving them access to your entire infrastructure.
Sketchfab is excellent for portfolios. It's built around the idea of 3D as something you share socially, not as the asset backend for an application. The URL structure, the permissions model, the API: none of it is designed for the workflow where your CI pipeline pushes a new version of a model and your frontend pulls it.
Enterprise platforms like the one I built at my previous company do solve these problems, but they come with enterprise pricing, enterprise sales cycles, and enterprise complexity. A solo developer or small team can't reach them.
There's no purpose-built, developer-first infrastructure layer for 3D assets.
What Land of Assets actually is#
Land of Assets is what I kept wishing existed.
It's a hosting and management platform built specifically for GLTF/GLB files and the developers who use them. Push a model via CLI or API, get a versioned CDN URL, drop it into your Three.js scene.
https://api.landofassets.com/media/BenHouston3D/Samples/assets/WaterBottle.glb
Omit the version and you get the latest. Pin a version and it's immutably cached forever. Proper cache headers, Cloudflare delivery, thumbnail generation, a 3D preview viewer, and team permissions designed for how developers and artists work together: artists don't need to understand Git, and developers don't need to explain S3 IAM policies.
This is the infrastructure layer 3D web development is missing: purpose-built for 3D, not adapted from portfolio tools or raw storage buckets.
Why I built it#
I've spent my career in 3D at one scale or another, building rendering tools used in major film productions, contributing to Three.js and the glTF specification, and co-founding Threekit, where we built enterprise-grade 3D infrastructure for companies like LVMH and Crate & Barrel.
At every level, the asset management problem was the same. The solutions got more expensive.
I've built this kind of tooling before: robust versioning, CDN delivery, team workflows. But it was integrated into an enterprise product with enterprise pricing. Plenty of developers and smaller teams had the same problems we'd solved, without access to those solutions.
Land of Assets is my attempt to fix that: take what I know about building 3D infrastructure at scale and make it available to everyone, from the solo developer building a Three.js portfolio to the team shipping a production 3D configurator.
Who it's for#
If you're building 3D experiences on the web and the tooling has felt like it was designed for someone else, I built this for you.
The free tier costs nothing, and I’m keeping it that way for open source projects. If you've got a Three.js project that's groaning under the weight of its own assets, give it a try.
This post is also published on Land of Assets.