Google Draco .drc
Draco-compressed geometry, an order of magnitude smaller.
What a .drc file holds
Draco is Google’s geometry compression library, and a .drc file is a single mesh or point cloud squeezed by it, routinely to a tenth of the raw size or better. It is designed for shipping geometry over a network rather than for editing, so decoding it back to a normal mesh format is usually the first thing you want to do with one.
Commonly seen in: glTF pipelines, Google Maps, web 3D delivery.
| Data | Stored in DRC |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | No |
| Texture maps | No |
| Animation and rigs | No |
| Scene hierarchy | No |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded bunny.drc from three.js examples with its 2 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 69,451 triangles across 1 meshes and 1 materials, in 2.1 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert DRC to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with a .drc file
Questions about DRC
How do I open a .drc file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is DRC a good format to archive in?
DRC stores geometry. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.
Does converting DRC lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Written up on the blog
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.