Book Image

Learn Three.js - Fourth Edition

By : Jos Dirksen
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Three.js - Fourth Edition

5 (1)
By: Jos Dirksen

Overview of this book

Three.js has become the industry standard for creating stunning 3D WebGL content. In this edition, you’ll learn about all the features of Three.js and understand how to integrate it with the newest physics engines. You'll also develop a strong grip on creating and animating immersive 3D scenes directly in your browser, reaping the full potential of WebGL and modern browsers. The book starts with the basic concepts and building blocks used in Three.js and helps you explore these essential topics in detail through extensive examples and code samples. You'll learn how to create realistic-looking 3D objects using textures and materials and how to load existing models from an external source. Next, you'll understand how to control the camera using the Three.js built-in camera controls, which will enable you to fly or walk around the 3D scene you've created. Later chapters will cover the use of HTML5 video and canvas elements as materials for your 3D objects to animate your models. You’ll learn how to use morph targets and skeleton-based animation, before understanding how to add physics, such as gravity and collision detection, to your scene. Finally, you’ll master combining Blender with Three.js and creating VR and AR scenes. By the end of this book, you'll be well-equipped to create 3D-animated graphics using Three.js.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Up and Running
5
Part 2: Working with the Three.js Core Components
7
Chapter 5: Learning to Work with Geometries
10
Part 3: Particle Clouds, Loading and Animating Models
14
Part 4: Post-Processing, Physics, and Sounds

Summary

That’s it for this first chapter. In this chapter, you learned how to set up your development environment, how to get the code, and how to get started with the examples provided in this book. Then, you learned that to render a scene with Three.js, you have to create a THREE.Scene object and add a camera, a light source, and the objects that you want to render. We also showed you how you can expand this basic scene by adding animations. Lastly, we added a couple of helper libraries. We used lil-GUI, which allows you to quickly create control UIs, and we added an FPS counter, which provided feedback on the frame rate and other metrics using which your scene is rendered.

All these items will help you understand the examples in upcoming chapters and make it easier for you to experiment with the more advanced examples and start modifying those to your liking. Should stuff break or not result in what you expect in the next few chapters when you experiment, remember what we showed you in this chapter: use the JavaScript console to get additional information, add debug statements, use the helpers provided by Three.js, or add custom control elements.

In the next chapter, we’ll expand on the basic setup shown here and you’ll learn more about the most important building blocks that you can use in Three.js.