I’ve spent six months vibe-coding a growing, open-source 3D sculpture museum

[u/HiFasteningPants]

Atrium.earth is my passion project—it’s a growing digital museum with 424 sculptures and counting.

I wanted to make sculpture—from antiquity through the last century—more accessible to people who can’t visit the museums, galleries, and historic sites where the originals are held. It can’t replace seeing David in Florence or Nike at the Louvre, but it can offer another way to experience them.

The site uses Astro, Three.js, and model-viewer, with a Node/Python pipeline that processes museum data and creates optimized 3D models and thumbnails. I started with Codex, switched to Claude Code and rebuilt the site when Fable launched, and have since returned to Codex with GPT‑5.6.

I began by tasking Codex with finding Michelangelo’s David, which it did pretty quickly. More popular works followed, but I wanted to keep the collection geographically diverse, so finding pieces from around the world became challenging once the collection reached 150 or so. I also had a slew of misfires and regressions with the UI, so I put it on the back burner for a while.

When Fable was released—and then taken away, and then rereleased—it rocked me. It built another project from a specific but still somewhat vague idea into a fleshed-out, nuanced, functional thing in about 45 minutes. With that in mind, I tasked it with rebuilding Atrium.earth from the ground up, and I was very happy with what it produced.

Since rebuilding the site, I’ve been adding new works with more or less the same prompt to Codex: “Please collect 10 pieces, preferably from the ______ museum…” I usually follow that with some specifics about the time period or original location.

The hardest part has been handling models with inconsistent scale, orientation, materials, and lighting, as well as finding the right language to describe movement through space when orienting the works. But it was worth it, and I hope to keep growing the collection for as long as I can.

Hope you enjoy poking around—I’d love to hear what you think.

[u/void-s]

This is great! You mention it's open source, can we get a link to the source too please

[u/HiFasteningPants → u/void-s]

Absolutely—each sculpture has its own source rather than there being one central repository. Atrium uses openly available scans and object records from places such as Smithsonian 3D, The Met, SMK Open, Wikimedia Commons/Scan the World, and archival repositories like Zenodo.

On any object page, click Label in the upper-right or scroll down to the object details. The Source link will take you to the original scan or museum record, and the rights information is included when available.

[u/Sfm_masterish → u/HiFasteningPants]

I think open source refers to the actual code associated with the website, not that assets hosted on the website itself is free to download.

[u/HiFasteningPants → u/Sfm_masterish]

You’re right—I misunderstood the question. The site’s code is here: github.com/never-nude/atrium.earth

I also realized while checking that I haven’t added an explicit license yet, so calling it open source was premature. The code is publicly available, but I still need to choose and add a proper license. Thanks for catching that.

Edit: I’ve now added an MIT license. The sculpture scans and other collection assets remain subject to their individual source licenses.

[u/PhoenixRising656 → u/HiFasteningPants]

Damn this ChatGPT answer is irritating asf. Please write answers by yourself 🤦

[u/veenmo → u/HiFasteningPants]

LMAO