Why I Built Land of Assets
Ben Houston • 4 Minutes Read • February 2, 2026
Tags: land-of-assets, about, mission, 3d-infrastructure
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—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.
This is the dirty secret of 3D web development: the assets are an afterthought. 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 just 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 genuinely excellent—for portfolios. It's built around the idea of 3D as something you share socially. It's not built to be the asset backend for your application. The URL structure, the permissions model, the API—none of it is designed for the workflow where your CI pipeline needs to push a new version of a model and your frontend needs to pull 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. They're not accessible to a solo developer or a small team.
The gap is real: 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. The core workflow is simple: push a model via CLI or API, get a versioned CDN URL, drop it into your Three.js scene. That's it.
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 that make sense for the actual relationship between developers and artists—where an artist shouldn't need to understand Git, and a developer shouldn't need to explain S3 IAM policies.
This is the infrastructure layer that 3D web development is missing. Not a portfolio site. Not a raw storage bucket with a UI bolted on. Infrastructure.
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 just got more expensive.
APreviously, I've built sophisticated tooling for this—robust versioning, CDN delivery, team workflows—but it was tightly integrated into an enterprise product with enterprise pricing. I watched countless developers and smaller teams struggle with the same problems we'd solved, without access to those solutions.
Land of Assets is my attempt to fix that. To 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 you've ever felt like the tooling was designed for someone else, this is for you.
The free tier is genuinely free, and I'm committed to keeping it that way for open source projects indefinitely. 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.