u/Admirable-Tonight-73

Hey Reddit,

I've been working on a browser-based 3D visualization tool for real estate developers. The idea is simple: show buyers what their apartment will look like before the building is even constructed.

What it does:

• Load a real GLB building model and explore it in an interactive 3D scene
• Switch between Day / Sunset / Night / Rain / Snow / Fog with smooth transitions and dynamic lighting
• Street lights and building windows glow progressively as it gets darker
• First-person walk-through of apartment floor plans — WASD + mouse
• Select from multiple floor plans (Studio, 1BR, 2BR, 3BR) before entering
• Cinematic camera intro that orbits the building on load
• Auto-rotating presentation mode for sales office use
• Bloom post-processing for night scenes
• 4K shadow maps, physically correct lighting
• EN / RU / TJ (Tajik) language support
• Mini city environment with animated clouds, trees, parked cars

How it's built:

• Three.js r128 — rendering, shadows, PBR materials
• UnrealBloomPass — post-processing glow effect
• GLTFLoader + DRACOLoader + MeshoptDecoder — compressed 3D model loading (23MB → 5MB with gltf-transform)
• Raycast collision + hard bounding box for FPS movement
• Procedural textures — grass, asphalt, concrete all generated via Canvas API, no external image files
• ACES Filmic tonemapping — cinematic color grading
• Deployed on Vercel — zero config, instant CDN

The context:

Built this for a real estate developer in Tajikistan. The target use case is a sales office PC (discrete GPU) where a manager walks clients through future apartments. Not trying to run this on mobile — that's a different problem.

Biggest challenges:

• WebGL context exhaustion in Firefox (had to debug GPU tier detection)
• Getting browsers to use the discrete GPU instead of Intel integrated (classic laptop problem)
• Raycast collision with 182 mesh apartment model was killing FPS — solved with hard bounds + single-height rays

Here is deployed demo https://buildviz.vercel.app/

Would love feedback on the architecture, the UX flow, or anything you'd do differently. Also curious if anyone has experience taking something like this to production for real estate clients.