After yesterday's release of "Flutter's New True 3D Implementation: Building a 'Minecraft' with flutter_scene", many people wondered: has Flutter become a game engine? In reality, the main application scenario is not gaming, although it can indeed be used to make 3D games. For example, besides the bdero/flutter_scene mentioned yesterday that can build a 'Minecraft', there is another project called redstone_dart, which implements a Minecraft mod rewritten in Dart with a hot load feature:

In fact, the current application of 3D effects in Flutter is more like the following. Because it uses the same underlying rendering as Flutter, based on flutter_gpu, it can seamlessly render corresponding 3D models within the same memory:

This is actually the more useful scenario for 3D capabilities in Flutter right now. Of course, the image above uses another Flutter 3D rendering library, kiddo4/glint. Yes, yet another one.

*So although the official team hasn't promoted flutter_gpu themselves, the community has already produced many successful cases. Especially after Impeller finally added support for the Windows desktop, flutter_gpu has essentially completed its support for full-platform app scenarios.

This kiddo4/glint is also a Flutter-first 3D rendering engine, also based on flutter_gpu, rendering glTF/GLB models natively directly within the Widget tree. It's just more direct compared to bdero/flutter_scene:

It manages 3D scenes as ordinary Flutter state (setState to swap materials, Widgets anchored to model surfaces, etc.), while providing a backend-agnostic set of contracts for physics, animation, particles, and audio, combined with an optional native Box3D physics backend and a SoLoud audio backend to form a complete lightweight game engine.

The main implementation of kiddo4/glint's rendering core, GlintGpuFirstLight and GlintGameView (multi-instance game loop), is similar to:

• First, asynchronously decode GLB, textures, and HDR environment maps, and upload vertices, indices, and textures all at once as GPU resident resources.
• Then, each frame only updates uniforms (MVP matrix, lighting, material factors) and calls RenderPass.draw(), minimizing per-frame overhead.
• Directional light shadows are rendered to a color texture using a separate CommandBuffer and RenderPass, with depth manually written into the red channel instead of sampling the native depth attachment. This avoids a native crash issue where two RenderPasses sharing one CommandBuffer currently occurs in Flutter GPU.
• IBL ambient light is decoded from .hdr, combined with pre-filtered irradiance/specular maps for PBR shader sampling.
• Triangle data on the CPU side is retained for Möller–Trumbore ray intersection, used for click picking and Label3D occlusion judgment.
• Physics/animation/particles/audio are all defined as pure Dart backend-agnostic contracts, such as GlintPhysicsWorld. glint_box3d/glint_soloud/glint_basis can serve as pluggable native implementations.
• C++ extensions are compiled at build time using Dart 3.x's native assets.
• Shaders either use built-in pre-compiled .shaderbundle files, or users write their own JSON Shader Graph, which is compiled offline into an Impeller shader package by shader_graph_build.dart in hook/build.dart.

Overall, kiddo4/glint is indeed much more lightweight than bdero/flutter_scene. After all, bdero/flutter_scene is really aimed at gaming.

So kiddo4/glint is a general-purpose scene graph setup. It can't make games, but it is more lightweight, belonging to the Flutter-widget-first category where scenes can be declared as Flutter state.

bdero/flutter_scene, on the other hand, is more heavyweight. Although it can also be implemented as a Widget, bdero/flutter_scene can conversely embed Flutter Widgets directly into a game, seamlessly:

For example, below are two animations of a freely controllable Dash that I easily added to a Flutter App using bdero/flutter_scene and kiddo4/glint:

So, it's time to level up your Flutter App.

Links

https://glint.kiddobuild.dev/

https://fscene.dev/

https://github.com/Norbert515/redstone_dart