ViewAR
Your Blender scene, live in the room.
A Blender add-on and an iPhone app that stream the scene you have open into augmented reality over your local network. Move an object, add a modifier or change a material, and the AR view updates within a fraction of a second.
Checking a model in AR usually means exporting, sending and reopening it after every change. ViewAR keeps Blender open and sends only what changed, so the model on the table is always the model in the file.
Get the highlights.
Everything streams.
What the add-on sends, and how it keeps phones smooth.
Live streaming. Object transforms at up to 60 updates a second; meshes re-sent when geometry or materials change.
Only changes travel. A full scene goes out only when a device connects, a file opens, the unit scale changes, or you press Resync.
Modifiers applied. Evaluated geometry, exactly as the viewport shows it.
Instances. Collection, particle and Geometry Nodes instances, up to a limit you set.
Choose what to stream. Everything visible, the selection or one collection; hide any object from AR.
AR origin. The world origin or the 3D cursor lands where you tap, so far-off models are easy to place.
Pause updates. Hold the stream during heavy edits; phones catch up when you resume.
Basic materials. Base Color, Metallic, Roughness and Alpha from the Principled BSDF.
Automatic discovery. Bonjour on every network interface, or paste the IP by hand.
Multiple devices. Several phones at once, each with its own data count and a disconnect button.
Remembers your settings. Port, update rate and limits are kept, and the server can start with Blender.
Protects slower phones. Triangle and instance budgets per object, and automatic resync for devices that fall behind.
How it works.
Blender’s data is only ever read on its main thread; only finished byte frames cross into the network threads.
Watch the scene
A depsgraph handler marks every object that changed.
Build frames
A timer on Blender’s main thread turns removals, meshes and transforms into byte frames.
Send to each phone
One sender thread per device carries the finished frames.
Find each other
Bonjour advertises the server as
_viewar._tcp; manual IP works too.Place it
Meshes arrive in RealityKit’s Y-up space; tap a surface to place the scene.
One frame on the wire
Protocol version 1 has no instancing: each instance goes out as an ordinary object with a stable id such as Trees/Pine#0.12, and a mesh shared by many instances is triangulated once per update.
Made for older iPhones too.
The panel counts triangles and instances as you go, warns before a scene gets heavy, and lists anything it skipped.
Updates per second
30 by default; 15 to 20 for heavy animated scenes.
Scene size
Keep the whole scene under about a million triangles; the panel warns above that.
While previewing
Lower viewport subdivision levels, hide what you don’t need, or stream one collection.
While sculpting
Pause updates, then let the phones catch up.
Connect in a minute.
Computer and phone on the same network, Blender allowed through the firewall, and the app finds it.
Tech specs
- Add-on
- Blender 4.2 or newer, tested on 5.2 LTS, on Windows, macOS or Linux. No extra Python packages; the Bonjour libraries ship as wheels.
- App
- The ViewAR iOS app on an ARKit-capable iPhone or iPad
- Network
- Computer and phone on the same Wi-Fi or LAN, without client isolation
- Streamed
- Mesh, curve, surface, metaball and text objects, and instances of them, with per-corner normals and the active UV map
- Materials
- Base Color, Metallic, Roughness and Alpha from the Principled BSDF
- Not yet
- Lights, cameras and image textures
- Privacy
- The server starts only when you press Start Server, listens only on your local network, and never contacts the internet
