A lightweight, extensible, high-performance Avalonia 3D control library

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Online gallery: Aura3D-Gallery — run every engine feature (pipelines, IBL, animation blend space, materials) directly in your browser.

Demo project: TowerDefense3D — a tower defense game built with Aura3D, showcasing real-world usage of the engine.

Important

The project is under active development. Feedback and suggestions are welcome via Issues.

Overview

Aura3D is a lightweight, high-performance and extensible Avalonia 3D control library. It covers the full path from model loading, scene management and lighting/shadows to custom rendering pipelines, so you can integrate 3D content into .NET desktop applications.

Features

Area	Capabilities
Scene & models	Scene graph with a hierarchical node tree; native glTF/GLB loading plus FBX, OBJ, 3DS and 50+ formats via Assimp; built-in box / sphere / cylinder / plane
Camera	Perspective and orthographic projection, look-at and auto-framing, CameraController mouse/keyboard interaction, multi-camera split views, render-to-texture
Lighting & shadows	Directional, point and spot lights; CSM cascaded shadows for the main directional light (cascade count and split scheme configurable); Blinn-Phong forward pipeline by default
Environment & IBL	Solid-color, image and cubemap backgrounds; HDR panoramic skybox; PBR pipelines bake irradiance and prefiltered environment maps
Materials & shaders	Material channels and textures with sampling options; material-level custom shaders and shader macros; per-instance custom attributes
Animation	glTF skinning and external Assimp animations; 2D animation blend space; condition-based animation state graph; bone attachment
Particles	CPU-simulated particle system with emission shapes, mesh particles and flipbooks, full playback lifecycle
Pipelines	Built-in BlinnPhong / NoLight / PBR deferred / PBR forward / cel shading (default pipeline runs on OpenGL ES 3.0); custom pipelines composed freely from RenderPass with no VAO/VBO handling
Instancing & picking	InstancedMesh GPU instancing, InstancedMeshGroup hierarchical instancing (HISM with incremental updates and auto-grouping), point clouds, all primitive topologies; triangle-precise picking via Scene.Pick
Performance & debug	Frustum culling, octree spatial index, debug drawing for bounds, lights, bones and camera frustums
GPU resources	On-demand upload and release, automatic recovery from context loss
Platforms	Avalonia on Windows / Linux / macOS / Android / iOS; .NET 8.0 and .NET 10.0, including browser (WebGL2)

Quick Start

1. Install

dotnet add package Aura3D.Avalonia
dotnet add package Aura3D.Model.GltfLoader

Important

Browser (net10.0-browser) projects: .NET 10 Release/static publishing requires three extra MSBuild properties in the application .csproj — see Browser Release/static publishing.

At minimum you need one model loader. Aura3D.Model.GltfLoader handles glTF/GLB. For FBX, OBJ, 3DS and 50+ other formats, also add Aura3D.Model.AssimpLoader.

2. Use in XAML

<Window
    xmlns:a="https://github.com/CeSun/Aura3D"
    ...>
    <a:Aura3DView x:Name="aura3Dview" SceneInitialized="OnSceneInitialized"/>
</Window>

3. Load a model

public void OnSceneInitialized(object sender, InitializedRoutedEventArgs args)
{
    var view = (Aura3DView)sender;
    var camera = view.MainCamera;

    // Set background color
    view.Scene.Background = Texture.CreateFromColor(Color.Gray);

    // Load glTF/GLB model
    var model = ModelLoader.LoadGlbModel("model.glb");
    model.Position = camera.Forward * 3;
    view.AddNode(model);

    // Add a directional light (required by the default pipeline)
    var dl = new DirectionalLight();
    dl.RotationDegrees = new Vector3(-30, 0, 0);
    dl.LightColor = Color.White;
    view.AddNode(dl);
}

See the documentation for more features.

NuGet Packages

Package	Description
Aura3D.Avalonia	Avalonia 3D rendering control (depends on Aura3D.Core)
Aura3D.Avalonia.Browser	Build-time wiring for the browser (WebGL2) render path
Aura3D.Core	Core engine: scene graph, nodes, resources, default pipeline
Aura3D.Model.GltfLoader	glTF/GLB model loader
Aura3D.Model.AssimpLoader	Assimp model loader (50+ formats)
Aura3D.Pipeline.PBR	PBR deferred rendering pipeline
Aura3D.Pipeline.PBRForward	PBR forward rendering pipeline
Aura3D.Pipeline.CelShading	Cel shading rendering pipeline
Aura3D.Angle.iOS	ANGLE (Metal) native frameworks for the iOS render path

License

MIT