codepawl/rocketbox-avatars-glb

Microsoft Rocketbox Avatars as GLB

Microsoft's Rocketbox library of rigged 3D people (business, medical, police, fire, military, construction, pilots, sports, adults and children) and rigged farm animals, rebuilt as web, game and engine ready GLB. Every human shares the same Bip01 skeleton and carries 175 face blendshapes (visemes, FACS and ARKit), so one animation drives them all.

Not made or endorsed by Microsoft. Avatars from the Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library, Copyright (c) 2020 Microsoft, released under the MIT License; the licence text ships in LICENSES.md and must travel with copies. If you use them in research, cite Gonzalez-Franco et al. 2020 (doi:10.3389/frvir.2020.561558).

140 rigged avatars from Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library by Microsoft, 243.8 MB of source files packed into 268.4 MB of GLB (web tier). Credit: Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Rocketbox), Copyright (c) 2020 Microsoft, MIT License. Gonzalez-Franco et al., The Rocketbox library and the utility of freely available rigged avatars, Frontiers in Virtual Reality 2020, doi:10.3389/frvir.2020.561558.

Viewer: https://huggingface.co/spaces/codepawl/rocketbox-avatars-glb-viewer

Files

Folder	Size	What	For
objects/	268.4 MB	meshopt geometry, WebP textures	three.js, Babylon.js, any glTF viewer with the meshopt decoder
objects_ktx2/	379.3 MB	meshopt, KTX2 textures (ETC1S colour, UASTC normals), mipmaps	WebGPU and WebGL games: textures stay compressed on the GPU
lods/	254.6 MB	three simplified levels: 50, 20 and 6 % of the triangles	distance LOD, crowds, far props
mobile/	78.9 MB	25 % of the triangles, textures at most 512 px in KTX2	phones and light laptops
engine/	3.97 GB	no meshopt, no quantization	Blender and desktop engines that cannot decode meshopt
collision/	0.4 MB	convex collision shapes, plain glTF	Rapier, Jolt, PhysX, Unity colliders

metadata.jsonl has one line per item: title, kind, licence, authors, triangle count and the path and size of every tier. The Dataset Viewer and load_dataset read data/*.parquet: the same rows with the mesh (Mesh, the plain engine/ GLB, decoded by trimesh) and the thumbnail (Image) embedded. Thumbnails are also in thumbs/. The 15 rows shown first point at a light copy of the engine file in preview/, so the viewer card loads quickly.

For web games and WebGPU

Load the objects_ktx2/ files for games: KTX2 textures stay block-compressed on the GPU (BC7 on desktop, ASTC or ETC2 on phones), so they take a fraction of the memory of decoded WebP. Use mobile/ on phones. collision/ holds convex shapes for physics.

glTF extensions each tier uses (also per row in metadata.jsonl, field extensions):

• web: EXT_meshopt_compression, EXT_texture_webp, KHR_mesh_quantization
• ktx2: EXT_meshopt_compression, KHR_mesh_quantization, KHR_texture_basisu
• mobile: EXT_meshopt_compression, KHR_mesh_quantization, KHR_texture_basisu
• engine: none

Measured on 12 items spread over triangle count. Phone page: 390x844 at 3x, pixel ratio capped at 2, CPU throttled 4x, network at Chrome's Fast 4G (150 ms, 9 Mbit/s), so phone load includes the download. The GPU is a desktop RTX 3060 and is not throttled: frame time shows the CPU side only, a real phone GPU is slower. VRAM is geometry plus texture bytes on the GPU.

Tier	File (median)	VRAM (median)	Triangles	Phone load (4G)	Frame time	WebGPU load (local)
web (12)	2.4 MB	106.9 MiB	7,810	2419 ms	0.7 ms	57 ms
ktx2 (12)	3.2 MB	18.9 MiB	7,810	2985 ms	0.7 ms	47 ms
lod2 (12)	0.6 MB	1.2 MiB	1,659	680 ms	0.6 ms	9 ms
mobile (12)	0.6 MB	1.3 MiB	3,961	753 ms	0.6 ms	10 ms

three.js WebGPU:

import * as THREE from 'three';
import { WebGPURenderer } from 'three/webgpu';
import { GLTFLoader } from 'three/addons/loaders/GLTFLoader.js';
import { KTX2Loader } from 'three/addons/loaders/KTX2Loader.js';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'three/addons/libs/meshopt_decoder.module.js';

const renderer = new WebGPURenderer({ antialias: true });
await renderer.init(); // KTX2Loader needs to know which compressed formats this device takes
const ktx2 = new KTX2Loader().setTranscoderPath('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0.187.0/examples/jsm/libs/basis/').detectSupport(renderer);
const loader = new GLTFLoader().setKTX2Loader(ktx2).setMeshoptDecoder(MeshoptDecoder);
const gltf = await loader.loadAsync('https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/rocketbox-avatars-glb/resolve/main/objects_ktx2/business-female-01/business-female-01.glb');

Use it in Crucible

Crucible (formerly 67js) loads these files as they are:

npm install crucible@npm:@codepawlhq/crucible meshoptimizer

import { CrucibleRenderer } from 'crucible';
import { loadGltf } from 'crucible/addons/gltf';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'meshoptimizer';

const asset = await loadGltf('https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/rocketbox-avatars-glb/resolve/main/objects/business-female-01/business-female-01.glb', { decoders: { meshopt: MeshoptDecoder } });
const renderer = new CrucibleRenderer(document.querySelector('canvas'), asset.parts, { ground: true });
renderer.render({ eye: [1.5, 1.2, 2], target: [0, 0.5, 0] });

Tested

Every file was loaded and drawn (drawn pixels counted) in each engine, three.js 0.187.0 and Crucible from main at 9220853a, files from a local copy of this repository. The people's 175-blendshape faces need codepawl/crucible#1176, which ships in Crucible 0.20.0 on npm. Two lod3 files draw nothing in Crucible (codepawl/crucible#1194).

Tier	three.js WebGL	three.js WebGPU	Crucible
web	140/140	140/140	140/140
ktx2	140/140	140/140	140/140
lod1	140/140	140/140	140/140
lod2	140/140	140/140	140/140
lod3	140/140	140/140	138/140
mobile	140/140	140/140	140/140
engine	140/140	140/140	140/140
collision	140/140	140/140	140/140

Blender 5.2 import: engine 140/140, objects 140/140, collision 140/140.

Licence and credit

Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Rocketbox), Copyright (c) 2020 Microsoft, MIT License. Gonzalez-Franco et al., The Rocketbox library and the utility of freely available rigged avatars, Frontiers in Virtual Reality 2020, doi:10.3389/frvir.2020.561558. Licence: MIT (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Rocketbox/blob/master/LICENSE.md).

Changes made: Converted from FBX and TGA to GLB and PNG in Blender 5.2: the highest-detail mesh kept, the 3ds Max materials rebuilt as PBR (colour and normal maps; specular maps left out), hair and eyelashes set to alpha cutout, the one-frame bind clip dropped. Rig (Bip01 skeleton) and face blendshapes kept. Then meshopt-compressed web files, KTX2 textures, LODs, a mobile tier, an uncompressed engine tier and convex collision hulls.

Source: https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Rocketbox at commit 0943055db6ec570bcef9f2c8b41c9e5467c808f9. Packed by CodePawl. Follow CodePawl on X, GitHub, Threads and YouTube.