Glossary

Draco Compression

An open mesh compression for glTF/GLB files that makes geometry much smaller to download.

Draco is an open-source library from Google that compresses mesh geometry (vertex positions, normals, UVs) by quantizing and entropy-coding it. In glTF it is stored through the KHR_draco_mesh_compression extension. Files get much smaller, but the importer has to decode them, which costs a little CPU time when loading. Textures are not affected. Not every importer can decode Draco: Blender, three.js and model-viewer can, Godot 4's glTF importer cannot, and Unity's glTFast needs the extra com.unity.cloud.draco package. On Grab3D, Draco is used only for the web preview in the 3D viewer, so the models load fast in the browser. The downloads (every GLB, including High Detail, light and rigged files) are not Draco-compressed, so they open directly in Godot, Unity, Unreal and Blender. If you need smaller files, for example for a web game, you can compress a copy yourself with gltf-transform (Draco or Meshopt).

See also: glTF / GLB · FBX · LOD (Level of Detail)

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