@toytown/models

A kit of low-poly, toy-town building models as GLB files, with a manifest.json describing them. It includes houses, shops, cafés, pubs, schools, churches, hospitals, offices, petrol stations, trees, small props and more. It's made for toytown-gl but works in any engine that reads glTF.

Licence: CC0 1.0. Use the models for anything, including commercial work, with no attribution needed. Provenance is in models/LICENSES.md.

Conventions

Every model follows the same rules:

• Y-up, metres. One unit is one metre.
• The front faces +Z, where the door and shopfront are.
• The origin is at the centre of the base, so the model sits on the ground at y = 0.
• One material per palette key. Materials are named like wall_cream, roof_red or window, and their colours are in manifest.json → palette as sRGB hex. The GLB baseColorFactor values are the same colours in linear space, as the glTF spec requires. To recolour the kit, look materials up by name.
• There are no textures or node transforms. Budgets: at most 2,000 triangles per model, 300 per prop.

What's in manifest.json

{
  "version": 1,
  "units": "metres", "up": "+Y", "front": "+Z",
  "palette": { "wall_cream": "#F4E9D8", "roof_red": "#D9644A", … },
  "models": {
    "house": {
      "file": "generic/house.glb",
      "pack": "generic",
      "osm_tags": ["building=house", "building=detached"],   // suggested OpenStreetMap matches
      "materials": ["wall_cream", "roof_red", …],
      "footprint_m": [8.6, 7.8],                              // width (x) × depth (z)
      "height_m": 8.7,
      "variants": [{ "name": "house_2", "file": "generic/house_2.glb", … }]
    }
  },
  "props": {
    "awning": { "file": "props/awning.glb", "categories": ["shop", "cafe"], "attach": { "at": "front-wall", … }, … }
  }
}

• variants: other looks for the same category. house, shop and apartment each have 2. Pick one per building, for example by hashing an id, so streets don't look cloned.
• props: small parts to decorate a building when a full model doesn't fit. They are an awning, a red-cross sign, a church spire and a petrol-station canopy, and attach says where each one goes.
• Regional packs (e.g. ireland/) hold landmark models such as Tramore's Metal Man.

Skin model sets

models/skins/ holds two restyled sets of the generic models, under the same names, so a renderer can swap a whole set by name. Each folder has its own manifest.json (same format, paths relative to the folder) and preview.png:

• skins/voxel: every model rebuilt from cubes, coloured like the surface each cube came from.
• skins/chunky: squash-and-stretch cartoon, with squat bulging walls and tall steep roofs.

The props are restyled too. Both sets are generated by assets/generator/generate_models.py and follow the same conventions and budgets. In toytown-gl, the voxel and chunky themes use them (models.kit in a theme).

Using the models

three.js

import { GLTFLoader } from 'three/examples/jsm/loaders/GLTFLoader.js';
const gltf = await new GLTFLoader().loadAsync(
  'node_modules/@toytown/models/models/generic/house.glb',
);
scene.add(gltf.scene); // already Y-up, metres, front facing +Z

Babylon.js

import '@babylonjs/loaders/glTF';
const result = await BABYLON.SceneLoader.ImportMeshAsync(
  '',
  '/models/generic/',
  'house.glb',
  scene,
);

Unity: add glTFast and drop the .glb files into Assets/. glTF +Z maps to Unity's forward (+Z).

Godot 4: copy the .glb files into your project; Godot imports glTF natively. A model's front (+Z) faces Godot's +Z, the opposite of -Z "forward", so rotate 180° about Y if your game uses -Z as forward.

Getting it

• npm: npm i @toytown/models, then use @toytown/models/manifest.json and @toytown/models/generic/house.glb.
• A zip is attached to each GitHub release (toytown-models-<version>.zip).

The models are generated by assets/generator/generate_models.py in the toytown-gl repo. See docs/adding-models.md there to add your own.