Monday, March 14th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Free plugin puts a playable 3D Mario in any Blender scene


We already knew that you can play Super Mario Bros inside Substance Designer. But now, thanks to game dev Jeremy Burns’ free plugins, you can control a 3D version of Mario inside Blender and Unity as well.

Free plugin puts a controller-playble version of Mario in any scene in the Blender viewport
Burns’ libsm64 library provides a frontend to movement and rendering code generated by recent work to decompile the ROM for Nintendo’s 1996 3D platformer Super Mario 64.

It is intended to be usable in any game engine, but Burns provides a readymade plugin for Blender, making it possible to drop a playable version of Mario into any scene in the viewport of the open-source 3D app.

The work has a semi-serious purpose, in that it makes it possible to test Fast64 terrain layouts inside Blender – Burns says that he even plans to support water boxes in future – but mainly, it just looks a lot of fun to try.

A separate plugin is available for the Unity game engine.

Licensing and system requirements
Jeremy Burns’ libsm64-blender plugin is available for Blender running on Windows or Linux only. The libsm64-unity plugin for Unity works with Unity 2019.3.10. Both are free downloads.

This libsm64 library itself loads an official Super Mario 64 ROM at runtime, so any project that makes use of it must ask the user to provide a ROM for asset extraction.


Download Jeremy Burns’ free libsm64-blender plugin to put Mario in your Blender scenes

Download the libsm64-unity plugin from Jeremy Burns’ GitHub repo


Hat tip to Mario Howat at BlenderNation for spotting this story.