Pascal Editor — a free, open-source 3D building editor that draws walls, roofs and levels in a browser tab, then furnishes, renders, exports and embeds the result

• Pascal Editor

  This page

  PricingRoughly even

  • Building, editing, sharing and every export are free; only the AI models are metered
  • Credits cover image and video renders, generated items and materials, and assistant messages
  • Every account gets a daily free credit allowance that resets at midnight UTC without rolling over
  • Credit packs are sold through Stripe and the purchased balance never expires — no subscription is required to keep using the editor
  • MIT-licensed, so self-hosting the whole thing is a legitimate alternative to paying anything

• Planner 5D

  PricingRoughly even

  • A free tier with unlimited projects that works across web and mobile
  • The free plan carries a share of the furniture catalogue, with the full library behind the paid tiers
  • Premium is sold as a subscription, billed monthly or annually, and it is where floor-plan import, AI features and standard renders sit
  • Separate enterprise and education arrangements plus an API integration programme

• SketchUp

  PricingRoughly even

  • Subscription per user, billed monthly or annually, on every tier that does real work
  • The entry tier covers web and iPad only; the desktop modeller and LayOut arrive with the professional tier
  • A higher Studio tier adds BIM and photoreal rendering workflows, and is Windows-only for parts of that set
  • A free education tier exists for schools with a managed Google or Microsoft education account

• Sweet Home 3D

  PricingRoughly even

  • Free and open source — no account, no subscription, no per-seat cost
  • The paid money in this ecosystem is on the mobile apps, which are one-off purchases
  • Optional support and school arrangements exist for organisations that want them

1. Pascal Editor — official site
2. Pascal Editor — documentation
3. Pascal Editor — how credits work
4. Pascal Editor — export and bake formats
5. Pascal Editor — embed the viewer
6. Pascal Editor — run the editor locally
7. Pascal Editor — connect an AI agent
8. Pascal Editor — source repository
9. Pascal Editor — changelog
10. Pascal Editor — terms of service
11. Pascal Editor — privacy policy
12. Planner 5D — official site
13. Planner 5D — plans
14. SketchUp — official site
15. SketchUp — plans and pricing
16. Sweet Home 3D — official site

Free tier

Yes

Pricing summary

The split that matters here is between the editor and the AI. Everything you do yourself — drawing walls, stacking levels, placing furniture, painting materials, rendering snapshots of the viewport, exporting a model or a floor plan, sharing a link, publishing to the community — is free, and no card is involved. What is metered is the model work: the Studio transforms snapshots into photoreal images and video clips, the item builder and material studio generate assets, and the assistant writes to your scene. All of it draws on one credit balance, and every account receives a daily free allowance that refills at midnight UTC rather than rolling over. Images are charged per image and videos per second, priced by the model and the resolution or quality tier you choose, and the compose panel shows the arithmetic next to the generate button before you commit. Assistant messages are metered by how much the model reads and writes, which is why a small edit is cheap and building and furnishing a whole house is the most expensive single request you can make. Free credits are always spent first; purchased credits are only touched once the day’s allowance is gone, and they do not expire. Packs are bought in-app through a hosted checkout with promotion-code support, and when a generation fails the purchased credits it consumed are refunded automatically. In an organization the workspace holds its own shared balance that owners and admins top up, while each member spends their personal daily free credits first. Two smaller details are worth knowing before you plan around this: an account is required for anything that saves, and an organization cannot be deleted while a paid credit balance remains. Treat the structure — free editor, metered AI, pack-based top-ups — as the stable part and confirm current pack sizes and model prices on the official credits page.

Reviewed on 24 September 2026 · Pascal Editor — how credits work

• Walls, floors, levels and roofs

  Walls are drawn straight or curved in two clicks with live measurements and snapping, then reshaped, moved or deleted. Floor slabs and ceilings are created automatically from the walls you drew or drawn by hand, and levels stack into a multi-storey building you switch between. Roofs start from a footprint drawn in two clicks, with seven roof types and adjustable pitch, overhang and trim.

• A floor plan as a scaled guide underneath

  A plan, a sketch or a site drawing can be placed under the grid and scaled, and then built over directly. It is the fastest way to get an existing building into the editor, and it is a good deal less work than measuring everything into empty space.

• Doors and windows that cut real openings

  Openings are not painted onto a wall — they cut into it, slide along its length, and can be sized exactly. Zones then label each room with a name and colour, which is what makes a generated floor plan legible and lets the assistant work one room at a time.

• A furniture catalogue, presets and custom items

  Items are browsed by category or by room, and anything configured — a styled wall, a dressed table, a whole room — can be saved as a preset that stays private or is shared with the community. Custom items arrive either as a GLB upload or as a generated model from a photo or a description.

• Materials painted per surface

  Walls, floors and furniture are painted from a material catalogue of colours, wood, stone and tile, and the Material Studio generates seamless PBR textures from a prompt, a photo or an existing texture to paint straight onto the model.

• An assistant that builds and edits the scene

  The chat panel creates rooms, furnishes spaces and edits the scene on request, and it reports what each answer used in tokens and credits. It is genuinely useful for the tedious pass — emptying a room, restyling a level — and it keeps everything it already placed if the balance runs out mid-build.

• Studio renders and motion

  A snapshot of the scene is the reference, and Studio turns it into photoreal images and short video clips while keeping the real layout. References can be pinned as structure, style or composition, output can be varied and resolution-tiered, and every render lands in a per-project gallery that can be fed back into the next generation.

• Scan a real room with a phone

  The companion iOS app uses the LiDAR sensor on a Pro iPhone or iPad to walk a room and convert it into editable walls, doors, windows and furniture — not a frozen mesh. The room arrives as a named zone with the scan layers — model, point cloud, mesh and the path walked — kept alongside it for comparison.

• Sharing, organisations and live collaboration

  Every project starts private and a share link makes it viewable without an account, with levels, wall height and display settings under the visitor’s control. Publishing adds a community page with a cover and attached renders. Organisations pool projects, files and credits, and members can edit the same project live while following each other’s camera.

• Exports, a live embed and an open engine

  Scenes leave as GLB with materials and structure intact, as STL or OBJ geometry, as watertight 3D-print parts at 1:100, or as floor plan PDFs, and a published project can be embedded on any site with a single iframe. Underneath, the engine is MIT-licensed and published on npm, and the CLI runs the editor and a local MCP server so an agent can drive the same scene.

1. 1

   Start from a measured reference, not from memory

   If the space exists, put a plan or sketch under the grid and scale it before you draw anything. If it does not, sketch it on paper first — a floor plan is much easier to correct on paper than to redraw as walls after the fact.

2. 2

   Draw the shell before the contents

   Walls first, with live measurements and snapping doing the arithmetic, then the openings, then levels and the roof. Furniture placed before the shell is settled tends to be moved twice, and rooms that are the wrong size are cheapest to fix while there is nothing in them.

3. 3

   Name the zones as you go

   Zones are what label the floor plan, what the assistant uses to work room by room, and what tells a visitor where they are in the viewer. Naming them at the end is a chore; naming them as you close each room is free.

4. 4

   Use the assistant for the tedious pass

   Asking the assistant to furnish a living room or restyle a level is a good use of a metered feature, and it keeps the scene consistent. Watch the estimate next to the composer, because a whole-house request is the most expensive thing you can ask for, and multi-step builds and the first message after an idle hour both run above the estimate.

5. 5

   Paint before you render

   A plain grey shell renders as a plain grey shell. Painting surfaces with the material catalogue, or generating a texture in the Material Studio, is what makes the snapshot worth feeding to the render models — and the renders are the part of the workflow that costs credits, so it pays not to waste them on a scene that is not dressed yet.

6. 6

   Export for the next tool, embed for the audience

   GLB is the export that carries materials and the level structure into Blender or an engine; the 3D-print export is the one that gives a slicer watertight parts rather than render surfaces. For people rather than software, publish the project and embed the viewer with one iframe — the embed updates whenever you republish.

7. 7

   Check the measurements before you build for real

   This is a design tool, not a surveying one, and the vendor says plainly that you must review and validate any output before using it for real-world construction, engineering or compliance. Treat dimensions from a scan or a guide image as a starting point and verify anything structural or regulated against the real space.

• People planning a renovation of their own home

  Walking a room with the phone, then rearranging walls and furniture in the browser, is a much better way to test a layout than arguing about a plan on paper. The walk-through mode is what makes the decision feel real before anything is ordered.

• Interior and spatial designers prototyping a layout

  A browser canvas with a furniture catalogue, materials and an assistant covers the early shaping of a scheme, and the GLB export or the Blender send means the same scene carries on into proper rendering without being rebuilt.

• Architects and visualisers doing massing studies

  Levels, roofs, openings and guide images are enough to test a footprint, stack storeys and produce a floor plan PDF or a printable scale model — and IFC import in alpha means an existing model can be brought in to work over, even though it cannot go back out.

• Developers and design engineers building spatial features

  This is where the offer is hardest to find elsewhere: a viewer and editor published as MIT-licensed packages, a self-hostable runtime, and an MCP server that lets a coding agent read and reshape a scene. For an agent, the semantic tools — create a room, add a door, furnish a room, validate — are the interesting part.

• Marketers and product teams showing a space

  A published project gives people something to orbit in 3D instead of a render to scroll past, and the iframe embed drops that into a landing page or a listing with no SDK and no account for the visitor. For property, showroom and interior retail pages, that is a better artefact than a gallery.

• Teachers and students working through spatial design

  Because the whole editor is free, browser-based and open source, it is a low-stakes way to learn how plans, levels and openings relate. The licence also means a school can run its own copy rather than depending on a vendor account.

A browser application with an optional local runtime

The hosted editor runs in the browser with nothing to install, and accounts are passwordless — Google sign-in or an emailed magic link and six-digit code. Everything built is saved to the cloud account. Separately, the open-source CLI installs a persistent local editor runtime, starts it and an authenticated MCP service as detached processes on loopback ports, and keeps projects in a local database. It requires recent Node.js, and the first CLI release is macOS-only with Linux and Windows unverified.

Credits pay for models, not for the editor

One balance covers Studio images and video, generated items and materials, and assistant messages. Every account gets a daily allowance that resets at midnight UTC and does not roll over; purchased credits never expire and are only spent after the daily allowance. Image models are priced per image and video models per second, both varying by model and resolution or quality tier, and the exact cost is shown before you generate. Failed generations refund purchased credits automatically. No card is required to use the editor itself.

What exports, and in what shape

GLB carries materials, textures, glass as real transmission, and the level and room structure as glTF extras. STL and OBJ carry geometry only. A separate 3D-print export compiles the building structure — not furniture — into watertight parts, one per level, at 1:100 with real millimetres declared, packaged as 3MF and tested against two common slicers. Floorplans export as landscape A4 PDFs with one page per level, with a structure-only option that drops furniture. A JSON scene save exists for backup, and publishing bakes an optimised copy for the viewer.

The embed is an iframe and nothing more

A public project can be embedded on any site with a single iframe pointing at its viewer page, optionally hiding the header and bottom bar. That is the entire integration surface: there is no oEmbed endpoint, no JavaScript API and no postMessage interface, the starting camera cannot be set from the URL, and only the read-only viewer can be embedded — not the editor. Signed-out visitors see a small get-started card that cannot be hidden.

AI agents are a first-class path, not a bolt-on

A hosted MCP server lets an agent create, inspect, edit, validate and save projects in the account or organisation that issued the API key, and the local CLI starts an equivalent service against local projects with no hosted account required. Clients include coding agents on both HTTP and a stdio connector. The exposed tools are semantic — rooms, walls, openings, levels, roofs, furniture, measurements, validation and collision checks — rather than raw scene patches, and the documentation is explicit that a footprint check proves nothing about height clearance, door swing or delivery paths.

Spatial scanning is LiDAR-only

The companion iOS app converts a room into editable elements using Apple’s RoomPlan framework, which needs a LiDAR sensor — a Pro iPhone or a recent iPad Pro on a recent iOS version. Other iPads can sign in and view projects but cannot scan. Scans sync to the same account as the editor, and the raw scan layers travel with the project so a straightened wall can be checked against the points it came from.

Collaboration is per-project and server-authoritative in the way that counts

Live editing lets organisation members work the same project at once, follow each other’s camera and move projects between workspaces — though a project that has already been edited live cannot be moved. Scans and floorplan guides have their own visibility switches, so a finished design can be published while the scan of a real home stays hidden, and duplication is a per-publication choice.

What it does not do

There is no IFC export, and IFC import is explicitly alpha with rough mapping that saves uploaded files so the team can investigate. It is not a BIM or construction-documentation tool, it has no parametric constraints, assemblies or simulation, and the terms state that output must be reviewed and validated before real-world construction, engineering or compliance use. There is no plugin installation through the managed CLI in the first release, no system startup service, no LAN or public binding, and no Windows or Linux verification for the local runtime yet.