The users of Panda3D include the developers of several large commercial games, a few open source projects, and a number of university courses that leverage Panda3D's short learning curve.

They built an attraction called "Aladdin's Magic Carpet," and the engine they created for that eventually became Panda3D.

There were several interested users, but building and installing the system was incredibly complex, and there was little in the way of documentation or sample code, so there was no significant open source community right away.However, the open-sourcing of the engine allowed Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center to join in the development of the engine.

[7] This means that the virtual world is initially an empty Cartesian space into which the game programmer inserts 3D models.

The Panda3D scene graph exposes the functionality of OpenGL and DirectX in a fairly literal form.

Of course, it also provides higher-level operators, such as loading models, executing animations, detecting collisions, and the like.

[citation needed] To remedy this situation, the Panda3D developers have recently given Panda3D the ability to synthesize shaders automatically.

Releases prior to that date are not considered free software due to certain errors in the design of the old Panda3D license.

However, the license had a few flaws that made it non-free: it arguably required submitting changes to Panda.Project@Disney.com,[10] and it explicitly prohibited the export of the software to various nations against which the United States had trade embargoes.

[12] Panda3D makes use of several third-party libraries whose licenses are not free software, including FMOD, Nvidia Cg, DirectX, and MFC.