Best 3D Viewers for Mac

Meshmixer is state-of-the-art software for working with triangle meshes. Do you need to clean up a 3D scan, do some 3D printing, or design an object that fits something else? Meshmixer can help. Think of it as a sort of "Swiss Army Knife" for 3D meshes. Drag-and-Drop Mesh Mixing. 3D Sculpting and Surface Stamping. Robust Convert-to-Solid for 3D printing. 3D Patterns & Lattices. Hollowing (with escape holes!). Branching Support Structures for 3D printing. Automatic Print Bed Orientation Optimization, Layout & Packing. Advanced selection tools including brushing, surface-lasso, and constraints. Remeshing and Mesh Simplification/Reducing. Mesh Smoothing and Free-Form Deformations. Hole Filling, Bridging, Boundary Zippering, and Auto-Repair. Plane Cuts, Mirroring, and Booleans. Extrusions, Offset Surfaces, and Project-to-Target-Surface. Interior Tubes & Channels. Precise 3D Positioning with Pivots. Automatic Alignment of Surfaces. 3D Measurements. Stability & Thickness Analysis.

FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD allows you to sketch geometry constrained 2D shapes and use them as a base to build other objects. It contains many components to adjust dimensions or extract design details from 3D models to create high quality production ready drawings. FreeCAD is a multiplatfom (Windows, Mac and Linux), highly customizable and extensible software. It reads and writes to many open file formats such as STEP, IGES, STL, SVG, DXF, OBJ, IFC, DAE and many others, making it possible to seamlessly integrate it into your workflow. FreeCAD is designed to fit a wide range of uses including product design, mechanical engineering and architecture. Whether you are a hobbyist, a programmer, an experienced CAD user, a student or a teacher, you will feel right at home with FreeCAD.

With the schematic editor you can create your design without limit, there are no paywalls to unlock features. An official library for schematic symbols and a built-in schematic symbol editor help you get started quickly with your designs. Make professional PCB layouts with up to 32 copper layers. KiCad now has a push and shove router which is capable of routing differential pairs and interactively tuning trace lengths. KiCad includes a 3D viewer which you can use to inspect your design in an interactive canvas. You can rotate and pan around to inspect details that are difficult to inspect on a 2D view. Multiple rendering options allow you to modify the aesthetic appearance of the board or to hide and show features for easier inspection. KiCad’s schematic capture is efficient, with all the tools you can expect for such a task. The interface focuses on productivity. There are no complexity limits, as large designs can be divided into hierarchical subsheets.

ABViewer is universal software for PC for working with drawings. It enables you to view, edit, convert, measure and print DWG and other CAD files, as well as 3D models and raster images. You can work with a separate fragment of a drawing or, on the contrary, with a group of files. All this at an attractive price! ABViewer allows converting single files or a group of files. Batch conversion provides a wide range of export settings, for example, black-and-white mode, specifying the output file size, etc. The 3D section panel has controls for setting up visual display of 3D models and section planes. The panel is available in the 3D Viewer mode. The commands and options of the 3D Section panel enable to customize 3D model viewing. To display parts of a model, section and gizmo use the settings located at the top of the form. It is possible to create several planes at the same time.

view3dscene is a viewer for many 3D model formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Collada, 3DS, MD3, Wavefront OBJ, STL and (2D) Spine JSON and sprite sheets (in CGE, Cocos2d, Starling XML formats). Explore the virtual world with collisions, gravity, animations, sensors, shadows, mirrors, shaders, and more. You can also convert all models to X3D. If you already have Castle Game Engine, then just run view3dscene executable in CGE bin subdirectory. There's no need to download it separately. All the 3D and 2D model formats supported by Castle Game Engine can be opened, X3D, VRML, Collada, 3DS, MD3, Wavefront OBJ, Spine JSON. Various navigation modes are available. Examine (easily rotate and move the whole model), walk (walk like in FPS games, with collision detection, gravity and related features available), fly (similar to Walk but without gravity), 2D. You can convert between X3D classic and XML encodings (in both directions), and you can convert from VRML 2 to X3D.

I frequently had the problem that downloaded STL files needed some minor editing in order to be printable on my 3D printer. Most of the time it was just a simple move to the center of the build platform or a resize. In addition to that, I already wrote OpenGL code to visualize STL and GCode files a couple of months ago for another larger project. Finally, I had sometimes a problem that I downloaded an ASCII encoded STL file and wanted to open the file in my 3D/CAD application. Since this application can only read binary STL files I needed an easy way to convert ASCII STL to binary STL. So I wrote Pleasant3D, a small utility that solves these problems and uses the above-mentioned visualization code to display STL and GCode files. This version implements better error checking in the Quicklook plugins and falls back to displaying the standard document icon if the Quicklook generation fails. That way quicklockd doesn't crash anymore in case of problems.

Autodesk Viewer supports most 2D and 3D files, including DWG, STEP, DWF, RVT, and SolidWorks. Quickly get the feedback you need with Autodesk Viewer's lightweight drawing and annotation tools. Autodesk Viewer lets you access and collaborate on your designs from any device or operating system. View DWG files or convert them to work with older versions of AutoCAD software. Add Design Review to mark up 2D and 3D files without the original design software. For greater flexibility consider Autodesk Viewer or AutoCAD web app. Get quick, anytime access to CAD drawings with the AutoCAD web app. View, edit, share, and create DWG files in a web browser on any computer. No software installation required. Use the drafting tools and commands you're used to.

Open Cascade CAD Assistant is a powerful offline 3D CAD viewer and converter with simple and intuitive interface, free for both personal and commercial use. Originally developed as a testbed and showcase for the Open CASCADE Technology on mobile platforms, the solution has been appreciated as fast and handy 3D viewer by thousands of end-users on mobiles and desktops worldwide. CAD Assistant brings the power of open technologies to the hands of engineers working with 3D data. CAD Assistant is based on open source libraries (Open CASCADE Technology, Qt, FreeType, FreeImage, etc.) and employs open formats for CAD and mesh data (STEP, IFC, IGES, BREP, glTF, JT, PLY, STL, OBJ, 3DM). It also supports a set of other file formats like DXF, SAT (ACIS), XT (Parasolid). Viewing mesh models with associated data is an additional functionality included in CAD Assistant. Mesh can be read from files in PLY format.

Fill out and sign forms right on your Mac. You don’t need to print PDF forms. Just use the Markup tools to fill in the form and even add a signature. If a PDF contains sensitive information, you can keep it secure by adding a password. Easily combine PDF documents and transfer pages from one PDF to another. Preview supports a large set of image file types, including JPEG, PNG, PSD, and TIFF. When you receive a photo that you can’t open in your photo editing app, you may be able to convert it to a file type you can use.

F3D is a fast and minimalist 3D viewer. It supports many file formats, from digital content to scientific datasets (including glTF, STL, STEP, PLY, OBJ, FBX, Alembic), can show animations and support thumbnails and many rendering and texturing options including real time physically based rendering and raytracing. It is fully controllable from the command line and support configuration files. It can provide thumbnails, support interactive hotkeys, drag&drop and integration into file managers. F3D also contains the libf3d, a simple library to render meshes, with C++ and Python Bindings, as well as experimental Java and Javascript bindings.