Launching Land of Assets
After a decade building enterprise 3D visualization at Threekit, I've moved on to build Land of Assets — a product visualization platform built entirely on open standards and tied at the hip with AI image generation.
Ben Houston • April 14, 2026 • 4 min read
After a decade building enterprise 3D visualization infrastructure at Threekit, I've decided to move on and build something new. It's called Land of Assets.
Here's a quick introduction:
What I Built — and Why
Land of Assets is a product visualization platform built on a foundation I've wanted to build for a long time: open standards all the way down, tied at the hip with AI image generation.
→ glTF/GLB — the universal 3D asset format, supported by every renderer, game engine, and AI pipeline
→ OpenPBR — open material specification with accurate, interoperable surface properties
→ Native Blender support — the world's leading open-source 3D tool, treated as a first-class input
→ Native CAD support — STEP, IGES, FreeCAD — direct from engineering, no manual rebuild
Open formats aren't just philosophically better. They're what makes AI image generation actually work. Feed your real geometry and materials into Land of Assets and the generated output looks like your products — white sweeps, lifestyle scenes, campaign renders — not generic approximations.
They're what makes full automation viable. And they're what keeps costs from compounding as your catalog grows.
Why Open Standards Matter More Than Ever
I've spent most of my career at the intersection of open standards and production 3D. I contributed to Three.js. I co-authored the glTF specification at Khronos. I've watched open formats go from an interesting idea to the backbone of every serious real-time pipeline in the industry.
The lesson I keep relearning is this: every asset you create in a proprietary format is a liability as much as an asset. The renderer gets deprecated. The platform pivots. The license fees compound. And when you eventually need to migrate, your entire visual catalog is locked in a format nobody else can read.
glTF and OpenPBR solve that. Assets in open formats don't depreciate. They stay readable, portable, and compatible with whatever the industry builds next — including AI tools that don't exist yet.
The AI Image Generation Connection
The thing that changed my view on what was now possible is how dramatically the usefulness of AI image generation improves when you give it accurate inputs.
Most teams trying to use AI for product imagery are frustrated. The sofa the AI generates looks like a sofa — not their sofa. Wrong proportions. Wrong fabric. Wrong finish. They spend more time rejecting outputs than approving them.
The fix isn't a better prompt. It's better inputs.
When your 3D geometry and OpenPBR materials are accurate and well-structured, they become the reference layer for generation. The AI isn't guessing what your product looks like. It knows. Feed that into a directable image generation pipeline and suddenly:
- White sweeps that match your actual finish
- Lifestyle scenes with your real product geometry
- 600 fabric options across 120 frames at 12 angles — generated in hours, not scheduled as a shoot
- Seasonal campaigns refreshed without a production crew
This is one of the core things Land of Assets was designed for. Your 3D assets power your configurator and your AI image pipeline from the same source.
What I Learned in a Decade of Enterprise 3D
I spent a decade learning what enterprise product teams actually need at scale. Not what they ask for in a first meeting — what they actually need when their catalog has thousands of SKUs, their engineering team keeps updating dimensions, and their marketing team needs new imagery every quarter.
They need infrastructure that doesn't require babysitting. One managed system where every 3D model, material, and configuration lives. Update once, and everything downstream — configurators, AI pipelines, marketing sites, ecommerce platforms — reflects it automatically.
They need open formats so that their investment in 3D content isn't held hostage to any single vendor's roadmap.
And they need automation so that the pipeline runs without someone coordinating every step manually.
Land of Assets is what I built when I got to start from scratch with that knowledge.
What's Next
We're live at landofassets.com. If you're working on product visualization, configuration, or AI imagery and want to see what the platform looks like in practice, book a demo — or just reach out directly.
This post is also published on Land of Assets.