Start by installing Zircon3D and creating your first project, then follow our documentation for step-by-step setup and configuration. You can also visit our YouTube channel for video tutorials covering common workflows and features.
Get Started: https://zircon3d.com
Documentation: https://zircon3d.com/docs
YouTube Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/@Zircon3D
Zircon3D 3.0 introduces new capabilities for room-level visualization, electrical and energy-system modeling, dashboard monitoring, object placement, and Designer productivity.
This release significantly expands what can be represented inside a Zircon3D project, from room-specific sensor conditions and historical trends to electrical routing, rooftop solar equipment, custom room geometry, and embedded 3D building views.
Room Box View can represent values such as occupancy, temperature, humidity, availability, alarms, or other room-level states by changing a room’s color based on incoming data. You can also disable Box View for individual rooms, such as hallways or utility areas, to keep the visualization focused.
At the building level, Room Box View provides a quick visual overview of conditions across multiple floors, using color rules to highlight occupancy, temperature, alarms, or other operational states. This makes it useful for offices, facilities, and other larger commercial environments.
To use it: Create a Room Box View in Layers and configure its color rules. In Edit Building, select a room and drag a sensor into Data Links. Then open Preview and select the Room Box View from the visualization dropdown in the status bar.
Tip: In View Settings, you can adjust the Room Box Opacity or hide the Room Box card for a cleaner view.
Enable Room Heatmap for an individual room to generate a heatmap using only the sensors assigned to that room, keeping its visualization independent from the surrounding floor-level heatmap.
To enable it: In Edit Building, select a room, then turn on Room Heatmap in the Properties panel.
Create visual electrical connections between equipment directly inside the 3D building model. Routing can connect equipment on the same floor, across multiple floors, or between indoor and rooftop equipment. Assign electrical roles to objects to make them available for routing.
This provides a foundation for visualizing electrical infrastructure such as panels, meters, outlets, solar equipment, batteries, EV chargers, and other connected systems.
To use it: In Edit Routing, click Add Path, select one port, then select another port to create the connection.
Place supported equipment and other objects directly at ground level around the building. This makes it possible to model exterior infrastructure and equipment that does not belong to a specific floor, expanding Zircon3D beyond the building interior.
To use it: In Edit Building, click Add and select Add Ground. A ground area is created based on the site view; click the Ground label to adjust its size.
Mount supported objects directly onto roof surfaces.
This is particularly useful for equipment such as solar panels and other rooftop systems, allowing them to become part of the same interactive building model as indoor equipment.
Use the new PV Array object to quickly create configurable solar panel installations. You can customize the number of rows and columns, panel dimensions, horizontal and vertical spacing, and panel and frame materials, making it easier to create solar layouts that better match real installations without placing each panel manually.
To use it: In the Model Library, find Solar PV Array under Energy & Electrical, then drag it onto the roof or ground. Use the Properties panel to customize its layout, dimensions, materials, and colors.
Use Modify shape to create more accurate room geometry by extending existing rooms or cutting away sections for irregular floorplans, alcoves, recesses, and other non-rectangular spaces. Hold Shift while drawing to create edges at any angle instead of being limited to aligned directions.
To use it: In Edit Building, select the room, then click Modify shape in the Properties panel. Click an existing edge or corner to start, then add points to define the new outline. Draw outside the room to extend it, or inside the room to cut away a section. Hold Shift while drawing to create edges at any angle.
Create rooms and objects more efficiently with new copy and paste workflows. Hold Ctrl to select multiple rooms or objects, then keep holding Ctrl while dragging to duplicate the entire selection. You can also use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste. This is especially useful for repeated rooms, equipment layouts, furniture arrangements, and other similar building structures.
Dashboards receive several major improvements in v3.0, with new visualization options and faster editing workflows:
Improved touch navigation on tablets and phones. Use one finger to rotate the floorplan or adjust the view up and down, pinch with two fingers to zoom in and out, and move two fingers in the same direction to pan the view.
Access Designer assistance directly from Help in the bottom status bar.
The Help menu provides convenient access to: Editing hints, Keyboard shortcuts, Official documentation, Video tutorials
v3.0 includes a range of usability and visual improvements across Zircon3D. View Settings now provide more control over the 3D scene, including shadow quality, floor reflections, Room Box opacity, and geometry outlines, helping balance visual quality, clarity, and rendering performance across different devices and project types. New Show Ports and Show Routing options make it easier to control electrical routing overlays, with these settings also supported in saved View Profiles.
The Model Library has been reorganized into clearer categories, while device lists are now more room-aware, automatically filtering and updating based on room and device selection. Stair selection has also been refined for easier editing, and new quick-access rotation controls make it easier to rotate selected rooms and objects without relying only on the on-screen position helper. Zircon3D project import and export is now supported, making it easier to transfer projects between Zircon3D applications.
Zircon3D 3.0 also includes a range of stability fixes and smaller corrections across the Viewer and Designer. These include fixes related to editing workflows, object interaction, visualization, dashboard behavior, and general UI consistency.
Learn how Zircon3D maps real-time IoT sensor data to interactive 3D models, heatmaps, dashboards, and digital twin views through Home Assistant.
Collecting IoT sensor data is usually not the hardest part of an IoT project.
Platforms such as Home Assistant, MQTT brokers, building management systems, gateways, and industrial controllers can already collect temperature, humidity, air quality, occupancy, energy, equipment status, and other measurements.
The more difficult question is:
How can we show real-time IoT sensor data in its actual physical location inside a 3D model?
A traditional IoT dashboard presents values through cards, charts, tables, and gauges. These are useful, but they often remove the spatial context of the data. A value may tell you that one sensor reports a high temperature, but it does not immediately show where that sensor is located, which room is affected, or what equipment is nearby.
A 3D IoT visualization adds this missing spatial context.
Instead of looking at an isolated list of sensor values, users can see the building, room, greenhouse, office, facility, or equipment layout and understand what is happening in the real environment.
This is the type of problem Zircon3D is designed to solve.
Zircon3D combines an interactive 3D environment with real-time IoT sensor data, heatmaps, dashboards, and device controls
The term “digital twin” can describe several different types of systems.
At the most advanced level, a digital twin may include engineering simulation, predictive models, structural analysis, physics calculations, maintenance planning, and lifecycle management.
However, many IoT projects have a more practical objective:
This can be described as a visual or operational digital twin.
Its purpose is not to simulate every physical process. Its purpose is to create a live spatial view of the real environment so that operators can understand conditions more quickly.
Zircon3D focuses on this visualization layer.
A developer building a 3D IoT visualization from scratch may consider a technology stack such as:
This approach offers complete control, but it can quickly become a large software-development project.
Rendering a model is only the beginning. The application must also manage camera controls, model optimization, device synchronization, data mapping, sensor history, user permissions, mobile performance, dashboards, error handling, and deployment.
For a research project or highly specialized industrial application, custom development may be appropriate. For a smart home, greenhouse, office, school, laboratory, farm, or small facility, building all of these components from the beginning may not be necessary.
Zircon3D provides these capabilities as a ready-to-use visualization platform.
Zircon3D includes a visual designer for creating buildings, floors, walls, rooms, doors, windows, furniture, and other objects.
Users do not need to create the entire building in Blender or write code to display it. The floorplan can be created directly in the Zircon3D Designer.
For specialized assets, users can also upload their own .glb models. This makes it possible to add custom equipment, machinery, furniture, greenhouse components, facility assets, or other objects that are not available in the standard model library.
Simple resizable objects can also be used as equipment blocks, platforms, partitions, cabinets, tables, storage areas, or placeholders.
This provides two ways to build a scene:
One of the most important questions in a digital twin project is how to associate a sensor with the correct location or object.
In a custom Three.js or Unity application, this normally requires manually assigning identifiers to meshes or scene objects and then writing code that updates those objects when new data arrives.
Zircon3D uses a visual mapping workflow instead.
After devices and entities are imported from Home Assistant, a user can position a monitored device at its real location inside the 3D floorplan. Its entities can then be used by different visualization components.
For example, a temperature sensor can be:
The same approach can be used for humidity, air quality, carbon dioxide, energy, occupancy, battery level, equipment state, and other numeric or status-based entities.
This means the relationship between the physical world and the digital model is created visually rather than through custom mesh scripting.
Sensors and Home Assistant entities can be positioned visually at their real locations inside the 3D floorplan.
Zircon3D currently integrates with Home Assistant, which acts as the IoT integration and device-management layer.
Home Assistant collects data from connected devices and exposes them as devices and entities. Zircon3D imports those entities and receives their state changes through a local proxy service.
When a value changes in Home Assistant, the corresponding Zircon3D visualization can update automatically.
These updates can appear in several forms:
The visualization therefore remains connected to the real environment rather than becoming a static 3D rendering.
Zircon3D does not currently require users to connect it directly to every individual IoT protocol.
Instead, Home Assistant provides the integration layer.
When an MQTT sensor is configured in Home Assistant and exposed as an entity, Zircon3D can use that entity in the same way as other Home Assistant data.
A typical data flow can therefore look like this:
IoT sensor → MQTT broker → Home Assistant → Zircon3D
This separation keeps the responsibilities clear:
Users do not need to create a separate MQTT-to-Three.js application simply to place live sensor values inside a building model.
Displaying a value above a sensor is useful, but it still represents only one measurement point.
Heatmaps provide a broader understanding of how conditions change across a space.
Zircon3D can map multiple sensors into a heatmap layer and display the estimated distribution of a quantity across the floorplan.
Common examples include:
This helps answer questions that are difficult to understand from a table:
Heatmap replay can also be used to examine how conditions changed over a selected period, adding a time dimension to the 3D IoT visualization.
Spatial heatmaps make it easier to understand how temperature, humidity, air quality, and other measurements vary across the environment.
Not every value is best represented directly on the model.
A good monitoring interface combines spatial visualization with conventional dashboard components.
Zircon3D allows dashboards to be displayed together with the 3D scene. A monitoring view can therefore include:
The 3D model answers where something is happening, while the dashboard provides detailed values and trends.
The 3D model explains where an event is happening, while dashboard cards provide detailed values and trends.
A digital twin does not have to be view-only.
Zircon3D supports control cards for compatible Home Assistant entities, including lights, switches, covers, climate devices, locks, and fans.
A user can select a device in its physical location and access the relevant controls. Depending on the device, this may include:
Commands are sent through Home Assistant rather than directly from Zircon3D to the physical device.
This allows Zircon3D to remain a visualization and interaction layer while Home Assistant continues to manage device communication and automation.
Supported Home Assistant devices can be monitored and controlled from their physical locations in the 3D model.
Privacy is an important consideration for smart buildings and digital twins.
When Zircon3D is installed through the Home Assistant add-on or Docker service, communication with Home Assistant occurs locally.
Sensor readings, device states, and locally stored monitoring history remain on the user’s own system. Zircon3D Cloud is used for account and license management rather than storing live Home Assistant monitoring data.
This local-first architecture can be useful for:
The visualization can continue to operate as part of the local environment without sending every sensor update to an external IoT visualization service.
Zircon3D is best suited to spatial monitoring and interaction.
It can show where sensors and devices are located, visualize their current values, present environmental heatmaps, display historical information, and provide supported device controls.
It is not intended to replace specialized engineering tools for:
For a digital twin that must simulate how pressure physically deforms a machine component, specialized engineering software or a custom application may still be required.
For a digital twin that needs to show the current pressure, temperature, position, alarm state, or operating condition of equipment inside a building or facility, Zircon3D can provide the visualization layer without requiring a new application to be developed from scratch.
A basic Zircon3D project can follow this process:
Configure the IoT devices and confirm that their values appear as Home Assistant entities.
Use Zircon3D Designer to create floors, rooms, walls, doors, windows, and important physical areas.
Use built-in objects, resizable simple objects, or uploaded GLB models to represent important equipment and assets.
Place each sensor or device at the location that corresponds to its installation in the real environment.
Display the entities through floating cards, dashboards, heatmap layers, status indicators, or saved monitoring views.
Save different camera positions and visualization settings for purposes such as environmental monitoring, security, energy, equipment status, or executive overview.
Open Zircon3D directly or embed a saved view inside a Home Assistant dashboard.
This process creates a practical digital twin without requiring users to build their own 3D engine, WebSocket service, device-mapping database, and visualization interface.
Not necessarily. These tools are useful for completely custom applications, but Zircon3D provides a ready-made 3D visualization environment for buildings, rooms, sensors, and Home Assistant entities.
Yes. Custom assets can be exported from Blender in GLB format and uploaded to Zircon3D. The building layout can also be created directly with the Zircon3D Designer.
Import the sensor entity from Home Assistant, mount the monitored device in the 3D floorplan, and position it at the corresponding physical location. Its values can then be shown through cards, heatmaps, dashboards, and monitoring views.
Yes. Changes received from Home Assistant can automatically update the 3D view, sensor cards, dashboards, and heatmaps.
Yes, when the MQTT sensor or device is configured as an entity in Home Assistant. Zircon3D uses the entity exposed by Home Assistant rather than connecting separately to the MQTT broker.
No external cloud IoT platform is required for Home Assistant monitoring. The Zircon3D proxy can run locally as a Home Assistant add-on or Docker service, and monitoring data stays within the local environment.
No. The same approach can be used for greenhouses, farms, offices, schools, laboratories, workshops, equipment rooms, and small or medium-sized facilities.
Building a digital twin no longer has to begin with selecting a game engine and creating an entire custom software stack.
When the objective is to visualize real-time sensor data in its physical context, Zircon3D provides a more direct approach:
The result is a practical 3D IoT visualization that connects the digital model with the real environment while reducing the development work normally required.
Explore Zircon3D, read the documentation, or join the Zircon3D community to learn more.
Zircon3D 3.0 is now available, delivering several items previously listed on this roadmap, including Room-Level Heatmaps, Room Box View, Electrical Routing, Solar Arrays, dashboard enhancements, improved touch controls, and more.
See the full Zircon3D 3.0 release announcement for details.
AI-assisted creation of Zircon3D building models from floor plans, drawings, images, or other existing building information.
Using AI to understand the current building, devices, and monitoring data and assist with common tasks or analysis.
An AI assistant that can answer questions about Zircon3D, explain features, and help troubleshoot or configure projects.
We’d love to hear your ideas and feedback.
If there are features you’d like to see in Zircon3D, please share them in our forum
Your suggestions help us understand real use cases and prioritize future improvements.
Items listed in this roadmap are directional and not guaranteed commitments. Priorities may change based on technical progress, user feedback, and real-world use cases.
Patch Update: Zircon3D v2.2.1 — 2026-05-15
We released a small patch update for Zircon3D v2.2.
New Feature
Bug Fixes
The new import/export feature can be useful when you need to move, back up, or share a floorplan between Zircon3D projects.
How to import/export a floorplan in Zircon3D
This feature is only for exporting floorplan data from Zircon3D and importing it back into Zircon3D. It is not for importing files from other design systems.
No. Zircon3D is not open source / FOSS.
Zircon3D is a commercial product developed by Lichr Inc. We provide a Free plan for general home users, but the main Zircon3D application source code is not open source.
Some installation-related resources are public, such as the Home Assistant add-on repository and setup instructions. These are provided so users can install and run Zircon3D with Home Assistant.
You can find the documentation here:
https://zircon3d.com/docs
The main Zircon3D application source code, including the 3D Designer, Viewer, rendering system, device mapping logic, and related product features, is not open source.
Yes. Zircon3D has a Free plan for home users. Paid Home and Business plans are available for users who need more monitoring devices, advanced visualization features, or larger/commercial use cases.
Zircon3D is built and maintained as a commercial product. Keeping the main application closed-source helps us continue development, provide support, improve the product, and build long-term sustainability.
We understand that some users prefer open-source solutions, and we respect that. For users who are comfortable with a commercial product that includes a Free plan, Zircon3D is available to try with Home Assistant.
We’re excited to introduce Zircon3D v2.2, a feature-rich update focused on making 3D building visualization more flexible, interactive, and useful for real-world smart home and facility scenarios.
Watch the v2.2 release video here:
This release adds support for custom GLB models, editable simple cube objects, more smart device control cards, room-level Box View styling, multiple selection, and many bug fixes and performance improvements.
.glb ModelsYou can now import your own .glb 3D models into Zircon3D.
This makes it possible to add custom furniture, equipment, machines, facility assets, or any other 3D model that better represents your real space.
This is especially useful when the built-in model library is not enough for your specific project.
We added a new Simple Cube Object.
This object is very flexible: you can edit its:
Even though it starts as a simple cube/block, it can be resized into many useful forms, such as a table, platform, partition, box, equipment block, parking area, raised base, or simple placeholder object.
It is a small feature, but very practical for quickly building custom scenes.
Zircon3D v2.2 adds more interactive control cards for Home Assistant entities.
The enhanced control cards include:
Light Card - Supports brightness percentage and color control.
Cover Card - For garage doors, windows, shades, blinds, curtains, and other cover entities.
Climate Card - For air conditioners, heat pumps, thermostats, and similar climate devices.
Lock Card - For door locks and other lock entities.
Fan Card - For fan entities, with related controls.
These cards make Zircon3D not only a 3D visualization interface, but also a more convenient 3D control layer for your smart home.
Status Bubbles on the Floorplan
Control cards also show clear colored status bubbles directly on the floorplan. This makes important states much easier to notice at a glance, such as when a window is open, a garage door is open, or a door is unlocked.
This provides a more intuitive way to understand the real status of your home or building directly from the 3D view.
We added Box View support at the room level.
You can now show rooms as colored box-style blocks and assign colors to different rooms. This provides a cleaner and more abstract way to understand room layout, zones, or functional areas.
In the next version, we plan to extend this feature so the room Box View can be mapped to monitoring sensor data, allowing rooms to be colored dynamically based on real-time values. For example room occupancy or other sensor data.
You can now select multiple objects or rooms by holding the Ctrl key.
This allows you to move or delete multiple items at once, making editing much faster and more convenient when working with larger floorplans.
This release also includes many bug fixes and performance improvements across the Designer and Viewer.
We continue to improve stability, usability, and the overall editing experience as Zircon3D grows into a more powerful 3D visualization platform.
Thank you to everyone who continues to test Zircon3D, share feedback, and help us improve the product.
Get started with Zircon3D: https://zircon3d.com
Documentation: https://zircon3d.com/docs
Community forum: https://forum.zircon3d.com
YouTube tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/@Zircon3D
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/zircon3d
This usually happens due to a Home Assistant ingress authorization issue.
Related: https://forum.zircon3d.com/topic/6/
You have two options:
Option 1 (Recommended)
Use port :11200 to access Zircon3D directly.
http://<your-ha-ip>:11200Option 2 (Using default HA port 8123)
If you’re accessing through port 8123, you need to authorize Zircon3D first:
Home Assistant only initializes ingress access after the add-on UI is opened once. If you try to load an embedded Zircon3D view before that, it may return a 401 Unauthorized error.
If the issue persists, feel free to reach out with details about your setup
Zircon3D allows you to visualize not only raw sensor data, but also custom computed values using tools like Home Assistant template sensors.
This guide shows how to create a Temperature Delta heatmap, but the same approach works for any custom metric.
Pre-processed data means:
Data that is calculated or transformed before visualization
Examples:
In Home Assistant:
template:
- sensor:
- name: "Living Room Temperature Delta"
unique_id: "living_room_temperature_delta"
unit_of_measurement: "°C"
state: >
{{ (
state_attr('climate.living_room', 'current_temperature')
- state_attr('climate.living_room', 'temperature')
) | abs | round(1) }}
Repeat for other rooms with consistent naming.
To scale easily across rooms:
uid contains temperature_deltaThis automatically includes all matching sensors.
Example:
Lower values = better comfort
Switch to the heatmap layer to see your data visualized in 3D.
You can apply this method to:
Related