// the find
pissang/dota2hero
Online Dota2 hero viewer based on WebGL
A WebGL viewer for Dota 2 hero models, built on the author's own ClayGL rendering library. It loads gITF/binary mesh files with full animation sets and PBR-style textures directly in the browser. This is a personal technical showcase, not a general-purpose tool.
The asset pipeline is solid — heroes ship as gltf+bin pairs with separated albedo, normal, and mask textures, which is exactly how you'd structure this for a real-time renderer. The animation coverage is thorough; Abaddon alone has 30+ SMD source files covering idle variants, ability casts, and injured states. ClayGL underneath handles the WebGL heavy lifting, so the viewer itself stays focused. The repo is a useful reference for anyone trying to understand how Dota 2's texture masking convention (masks1/masks2 channels encoding different material properties) actually works.
Dead since January 2019 — Dota 2 has added dozens of heroes since then and the viewer covers none of them. The README is two sentences and a link; there's no explanation of the asset format, how to add heroes, or what the masks channels encode. The SMD source files are committed alongside the compiled gltf/bin, bloating the repo considerably for no runtime benefit. ClayGL itself is also effectively abandoned, so if you hit a WebGL compatibility bug there's no upstream to file against.