The Met releases high-def 3D scans of 140 famous art objects
openculture.com334 points by coloneltcb 4 days ago
334 points by coloneltcb 4 days ago
Trivial to see the raw GLB files in a Viewer that gives you a bit more control.
https://github.khronos.org/glTF-Sample-Viewer-Release/?model...
The way most museum 3d viewers don't provide a download button always seemed a little odd to me.
Trying to capitalize on merchandising, even though it's all public domain.
That’s a really unfavourable view for what is a likely an oversight in UI design.
It's well established. Most public websites for museums have galleries of high res scans, and they're mostly all trying to keep you from downloading it. There are lots of tools out there to circumvent them, however.
This is a tautology and one at odds with itself. They simultaneously provide the high res scans but you think there’s a conspiracy to keep you from them. Why provide them in the first place then?
Not at all. They want people to experience what they have, but they don't want a small subset of people selling prints, T-shirts, and little statues. From their perspective, they sell excellent quality prints, etc. in the gift shop and online, and the proceeds benefit the collection. So they lock down downloads if they can.
But it’s not locked down, by your own admission.
Almost impossible to stop a determined actor from downloading media that you're serving to a browser. Most organizations don't have the budget or understanding. They outsource their websites, and ask for it to be as secure as possible.
Here's a little script to download all the publicly available scans (135) as GLBs and stick the metadata in a JSON. The scans are all CC0 (public domain)
I appreciate you building this and putting it on github -- I used it to build a simple offline gallery viewer.
Thank You For Making And Sharing!
anyone wanna throw up a magnet link for this so we don't hammer their website unnecessarily?
It's only a few hundred MB, and hopefully they're using a CDN.
For someone that doesn’t know about this, how does a CDN help? Don’t they still have to pay for all the data downloaded even if it’s hosted on a CDN. I thought the whole purpose of a CDN was just to make access quicker and had nothing to do with saving on bandwidth costs.
Thank you! Going to try to 3d print some of these and see how they come out.
The original article is https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/metropolitan-museum-o... Not sure why that is not linked, instead we have an AI generated SEO spam page.
OpenCulture's been around for a long time and has been a pretty good aggregator for interesting things in art and culture.
For what it's worth I thought the modal dialog on the original was worse than the pop-over ad on the copy.
It's kind of annoying that the 3D viewer on their website keep you a respectful distance away from the object like you might try to touch it if you got too close.
It appears they arbitrarily limit the zoom such that the object stays within the browser frame. On my gigantic monitor I can get super close. Lame that they set it to stop like that
It works really well with the AR viewer on mobile Safari.
For anyone wondering, you can access this by tapping the button showing a 3D cube at the bottom left of the 3D viewer. The button may be cut off if you're viewing in a web view in another app like I was.
The AR viewer runs with a much higher frame rate and you can get closer to the model. However the lighting is significantly worse, which ruins the appeal. The in-browser viewer is choppy and I can feel my phone getting a little warm, but it looks a lot more like viewing the real artifacts.
Doesn't seem to be an option on Firefox android
The AR viewer is using ARKit on iOS which is a default system “app”. I don’t believe Google provides the same kind of built in viewer experience with AR Core being surfaced as an app.
Interesting, on desktop Firefox I can barely zoom in past the point that the object fills the FOV.
I want to be permitted to navigate up close to a point where I can see the pixels and triangle meshes, as if I was a millimeter away from some brush stroke or chisel mark, and then back out just a bit.
Glad this was one of the objects captured, it's absolutely stunning to see in person: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/24671
I wish they had captured one of their Faberge eggs; those are almost more impressive.
Incredible. Why isn't it in France?
Not sure, but there's also a Van Gogh in that 3D collection, you could ask the same question for that one.
Probably the same reason there are french imperial eagles in British museums.
The provenance according to the Met:
>Henry II, King of France (until d. 1559);
>Carl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Residenzschloss, Weimar (by 1804–d. 1828);
>by descent to Wilhelm Ernst, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Residenzschloss, Weimar, later Schloss Heinrichau, Lower Silesia, Germany (now Henryków, Poland) (1901–d. 1923);
>his widow, Feodora, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Schloss Heinrichau (1923–1929;
>sold in May, 1929, to Kahlert & Sohn);
>[E. Kahlert & Sohn, Berlin, 1929;
>sold on December 14, 1929, for $135,000, to Sir Joseph Duveen for Mackay];
>Clarence H. Mackay, New York (1929–d. 1939; his estate, 1939, inv. no. A-17;
>sold through Jacques Seligmann & Co. on May 15, 1939, to MMA).
Unfortunately, this does not answer "why did it leave France?"
However, the book "Merchants of Art, 1880-1960: Eighty Years of Professional Collecting" (1961) by the rather famous art dealer Germain Seligman offers this missing link:
>Parade armor of King Henri II, embossed, damascened and gilded. Later presented by King Louis XIII to Bernhard von Weimar.
The museum helpfully has a "Provenance" tab that gives you the answer to this question. (the answer in this case is market capitalism)
So cool!
It recently dawned on me how we have a staggering amount of art available in these archives (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en, the Met, etc). It's truly staggering. Can't wait to use these images for my side project[0].
The MET also released a great article on their scanning process to preserve color accuracy https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/color-photography-sta...
Highly recommend reading it as a companion to these 3D scenes.
> high-def 3D scans
maybe 15, 20 years ago. I especially found the glossy shader goofy. No authentic replication, more 2000s gaming vibes. they should use gaussian splatting instead
I wish they would also publish the source images used to generate the 3D representation so people can recreate with other techniques.
Scott Geffert did a talk about The Met scanning process on Weds at the OpenUSD working group meeting. Here's the link he shared which explains more (along with a bit of history) https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/color-photography-sta...
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/metropolitan-museum-o...
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?showOnly=has...
Anyone know how the material roughness/metallic is captured? For instance here https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/253348. I've only seen basic albedo for 3D scans before. Maybe it's just hand-authored.
No idea what they used but I know that in Brussels they use CultArm3D FT20 by https://verus.digital basically a camera on a robot arm.
From what I saw in that file and a few others (in USDZ), the metalness is not captured. It's in 0/1_b.jpg , and the file is always pure white. You are only seeing roughness I opened them in Houdini and it translates to a USDPreview material, with those PBR channels connected: basecolor, roughness (decent map), metallic (no data, juste white) and normal map (decent map too)
> Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.
>
> To request images under copyright and other restrictions, …
If these are available as public domain with unrestricted use without fee, what is the use case for requesting a version under copyright with restrictions?
Not everything is open access data and public domain images.
This image is tagged open access & public domain: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/321937
This image is not: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/492371
No idea. But I've integrated their API to a commercial project (https://bookmarker.cc) without any issues. Users are exploring The Met Collection and save images to their library directly in the app.
> Through The Met Collection API, users can connect to a live feed of all Creative Commons Zero (CC0) data and 406,000 images from the The Met collection, all available for use without copyright or restriction. The Met Collection API is another foundational step in our Open Access program, helping make the Museum's collection one of the most accessible, discoverable, and useful on the internet. The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can now connect to the most up-to-date data and images of artworks in The Met collection, representing five thousand years of human history.
source: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/met-collection-api-2
Images 1, 2, 3 are under open access
Images 4, 5, 6 are still under copyright
Images 7, 8, 9 have usage restrictions
You misread it. The things that are public domain are available under that. The other things which are (still) under copyright are available under different terms.
Is anyone from the Computer History Museum listening? If they could do that, as well as scans with “exploded” parts it’d be a boon for both students and enthusiasts, who’d be able to 3D print replacements for many parts.
That would be cool. I really would like a 3d-printed replica shell of one of the old serial terminals, e.g. the TeleVideo 910.
Very cool! Checking out the Van Gogh painting in the viewer I can just barely see the depth of the brush strokes. Shame you can't look 90 degrees off axis to see the protrusion effect with the bulky outer frame in the way.
How easy is it to 3D print them?
You’d have to convert them from GLB or USDZ to something your sliver of choice understands.
Bambulabs app will directly read the USDZ if you’re on a Mac for example.
I did initially doubt the usefulness of viewing the paintings and embroidery in 3D, but then I spun this around and the back of the board is interesting as well.
I see the “spinning” view in browser, but I don’t see an option to download the STLs.
Edit: It appears the usdz AR file can be converted to obj/stl files.
Each of the models is available in fbx, usdz and glb if you dig a bit in the page. It's in a json file named masters
Compare to: https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/secret-3d-scans-in-the-fr...
I wish more museums would share their scans.
Any recommendations for art objects worth 3D printing at home? Bonus points if it would appeal to a grade schooler.
These scans seem perfect for fabrication experiments.
I’ve been trying a workflow where the mesh is inverted and used to generate a 3D-printed mold, then I gelcast zirconia ceramic into it and sinter it. The result is a dense ceramic version of the sculpture.
If you downscale the models they work well as small desktop statues or relief friezes, and ceramic casting can preserve surprisingly fine detail from the scan.
I wanted to try printing one but so far all of them seem like they’d be kind of disturbing to display in my house.
This one maybe? https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544887
Fill the base with concrete and use it as a bookend?
True. I’ll give it a try. They really didn’t think about supports when they designed this thing.
Absolutely beautiful scans. Thanks Met. Wonderful art that brightened my day.
This data needs to be reprocessed to make 3D gaussian splats instead.
Compare those scans to this splat for example: https://superspl.at/scene/d10c5638 The visual quality is unbeatable for 3D reconstruction IMO.
This is a fantastic resource, not only for present generations, but also especially for future generations if any of these objects were to be damaged or destroyed.
Does anyone know where the STL/OBJ files for the 3d models are at?
Check your browser console, network tab, search for .glb and you can directly download them.
Look for the file named masters, it's a json file that contains the filenames for those formats: glb usdz fbx
Can't wait to see how this plays with Vision Pro
Unfortunately they aren't high quality scans
Great use of WebXR.
Works well both on the Vision Pro (USDz format) and Meta Quest (glTF binary format).
That being said without the right mediation, without some context... unless you already are an expert in the domain what's the point?
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