Over the past few months, we've been on a mission to make the ShapeDiver ecosystem more accessible, transparent, and powerful for developers. We introduced the App Builder Testing Framework, showed you how to supercharge your AI assistants with our Agent Skills, and started opening up our UI tools.
Today, we are incredibly proud to take the ultimate next step in our continuous open-source efforts: we are thrilled to announce that the ShapeDiver Viewer is now fully open source and public!
You can check out the source code right now over on the ShapeDiver Viewer GitHub Repository.
Why Going Open Source Makes Sense
For years, the ShapeDiver Viewer has been the high-performance WebGL engine powering your 3D configurators. It does the heavy lifting of bridging the gap between your parametric Grasshopper backend and modern web applications. But keeping it as a compiled "black box" had its limitations for advanced developers.
We realized that to truly empower you to build robust, scalable, and highly custom applications, we needed to open the hood. Here is why we believe this is a game-changer:
- Total Transparency & Easier Debugging: No more guessing what happens under the surface when an API call is made. By having direct access to the source code, you can trace exactly how geometry is rendered, how materials are applied, and how sessions are managed. Debugging your complex implementations just got a whole lot easier.
- Ultimate Customization: Need a highly specific interaction manager, a unique camera behavior, or a direct Three.js integration that isn't supported out of the box? Now you can simply fork the repository, modify the core components, and tailor the Viewer exactly to your project's specific needs.
- Community-Driven Innovation: We have an incredibly active and creative community of computational designers and developers. By open-sourcing the Viewer, we want to invite you to collaborate. Found a bug? Submit a Pull Request. Built a cool new attribute visualization feature? Share it with everyone!
The Full Open Source Stack
With the Viewer becoming public, the core frontend stack for building ShapeDiver applications is now completely out in the open.
As a reminder, our UI-building framework, the App Builder SDK, is already fully open source as well! You can grab the code for it over on the App Builder SDK GitHub Repository.
This means you now have absolute control over both the 2D user interface framework and the 3D rendering engine. When you combine these open-source repositories with our recently launched Agent Skills for your AI coding assistants, you get an unparalleled, highly efficient toolkit for building incredible custom parametric web applications using Grasshopper.
What's Next?
We are incredibly proud of the hard work our engineering team has put into making this repository clean, well-documented, and ready for the public. But this is just the beginning of the journey.
Head over to the ShapeDiver Viewer GitHub Repo, star the project, and dig into the code. We can't wait to see how you use it, how you extend it, and how you help us improve it.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and feedback over on our support forum. Happy coding!
