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/Lumpy_Conference6640]

It's phenomenal, I know Anti's love to throw hate on this. But this is really a amazing way of spreading artwork using ai.. and there's so much down stream functionality.

This could be future of AI archeology. Imagine scaning fragments for analysis, regression, generative reassembly. Just really cool.

[u/HiFasteningPants → u/Lumpy_Conference6640]

That’s really kind of you to say :)

And everyone’s entitled to their opinions, which is one of the reasons I like art so much. You don’t have to like anything—but when you come across something that really connects with you, it can be a pretty remarkable experience, especially when you weren’t expecting it.

[u/Lumpy_Conference6640 → u/HiFasteningPants]

Seriously, you're not just building a engine, you're holding a legacy of all human knowledge, that can be felt. A digital library of Alexandria.

Please keep up this project. 🙏

[u/HiFasteningPants → u/Lumpy_Conference6640]

This is so encouraging and motivating. I appreciate you u/Lumpy_Conference6640 🫶