That looks neat but why would you need a react-style reconciler to render a webgl scene? It's immediate mode...every frame is rendered according to the latest state available. What is even being reconciled?
react-three-fiber is a really nice library to make web 3D things with. Three.js is brilliant, but there's a metric ton of boilerplate to get complicated things up and running. react-three-fiber just shuffles that away so you can concentrate on building a graph out of components. I've been getting up to speed with it for a little while and I've been chucking things I've learned in to a Github Pages site - https://onion2k.github.io/r3f-by-example/ Each example can be spun up on Codesandbox with the click of a link eg https://onion2k.github.io/r3f-by-example/examples/geometry/i... (Click the "Fork on Codesandbox" link)
There are tons of good examples of how to use react-three-fiber on Codesandbox - https://codesandbox.io/search?query=react-three-fiber&page=1
I haven't followed r3f development for the last six months or so, but previously I tested a couple of examples that were available as both r3f and pure three.js. I tested them on my old, slow mobile - and there seemed to be a big difference, with r3f much slower. When I brought this up with the devs, they have waved it away saying it's because the demos were running in dev mode (or something similar). However, I haven't seen any genuine comparisons of performance in r3f vs three.js, so for now I'm erring on the side of caution and assuming it's slow. I don't know enough about react to create performance tests myself, unfortunately.
You don't really need to err on the side of caution, you can just try some of the examples. The first example, https://i2160.csb.app/ runs well on my $120 3 year old Android phone. My instanced ducks example, https://os16k.csb.app/ only gets about 15fps but its doing more than most games or sites need albeit in a trivial way.
react-three-fiber isn't a magic bullet that will make all web 3D things fast. You still have to be sensible. It does make it much easier to prototype things though, and a lot of the time performance is great. And if it isn't then most of the code is quite straightforward to move to pure WebGL.
r3f does not have a performance overhead, it is literally zero. rendering is done in threejs purely, react only takes care of managing the scene. but it can, in situations where the app faces a lot of load, outperform three easily, because it is scheduled, just like a virtual list outperforms a generic list.
When I went to your site, the “screenshot coming soon” for each of them caught all of my attention so I didn’t notice the fork on codesandbox link.
But why not just have the live WebGL thing on each page itself?
I'm writing something to generate screenshots at the moment. They'll be there fairly soon.
I could embed the live WebGL, or a codesandbox embed. I might do that eventually.
+1 for embed live WebGL
Thanks for the helpful repo and linking to it! Been looking fwd to playing w react-three-fiber...
Nice writeup, I always like it when the shaders are highlighted like this. I got started in a similar way 7 years ago and have been making 3D terrains with THREE.js & WebGL since.
The real fun begins when you need to implement some sort of Level-of-Detail system and streaming in data to give the illusion of high detail everywhere without sacrificing performance.
Last year I released an open-source framework (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js) for creating 3D terrains for web applications, you can see Uluru here: https://www.procedural.eu/map/?longitude=131.036&latitude=-2... (unfortunately the aerial imagery from our default provider isn't as high resolution as other places in Europe)
Excellent write up. I've been using elevation models for the past few months to create real time shadows overlaid on slippy maps using WebGL. [1]
One thing I learned is that if you really want to recreate "real-world" terrain you have to account for the curvature of the earth. Uluru is over 3km wide and I estimate your image is around 5km. Across this distance the earth will curve 2 meters so you could modify the elevation model to drop off a meter gradually from the center to the edges.
That's ace when it loads, but modifying the time on the bar at the bottom of the screen makes the shadow disappear. I get a NaN in the URL which is presumably related (eg https://shademap.app/#47.62769,24.44286,4z,NaNt). Chrome 88.0.4324.182, OSX, no plugins to speak of. There's a bunch of 404s from Mapbox (eg https://api.mapbox.com/v4/mapbox.terrain-rgb/3/3/6.pngraw?ac...) but no other console errors.
The 404s from Mapbox are for elevation map tiles over the ocean where elevation is assumed to be 0.
As you pan, zoom and change the time, the url updates so you can share a permalink with others and they see exactly what you do. It looks like somehow you got an invalid timestamp (NaNt should be a timestamp: 1614115393106t). Will dig more into this. Thanks.
My date/time code only worked with US date MM/DD/YYYY and not DD/MM/YYYY. Fixed now.
And to think 50% of my traffic this month has been from Europe. A lot of users I won't be getting back...
Thanks for the bug report.
There's a lot of disinfo in this thread. React-three-fiber is great. Threejs by itself is also great. R3F allows people with minimal low level 3d graphics knowledge, to use higher level constructs they are familiar with, i.e. dom elements and react, to rapidly build compelling interactive 3d experiences. The aframe library is a similar kind of abstraction. WebGL has a thriving ecosystem and IMO is a signpost for the future of visual computing. Cross platform, OS agnostic 3D for the masses.
It's confirmed that I'm an idiot who happens to just be into WebGl and threejs these last few months. But I must ask about the choice to use React. Is there an actual benefit to using React or is it popular enough to justify its use?
I think React's main role here is just to provide structure to the code base: React component as the basic unit of logic encapsulation and then composing logic by combining React components.
Got it.
If you like this type of stuff, Paul Henschel shares similar content on Twitter [1] and it's absolutely amazing. For example, incredible stuff like this [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/0xca0a [2] https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1357346054635544584
A guide to rendering photo-real terrain with React + Three.js
At first the thought of combining React with Three.js left me scratching my head - but upon closer inspection the added abstraction actually makes sense and it's quite elegant. Thanks for sharing.
Also I had no idea what "frijoles" was, but I now have recipes bookmarked.
Looks very cool and there's a ton of good info here. But the final product is unusably laggy on my Dell XPS 13 i7 - not something I'd be happy to put into production.
Edit - thank you for all the replies, we have now established that different hardware renders at different speeds, quite the discovery.
It probably lacks a discrete graphics card. Not much to be done about that for a fundamentally graphics-concerned project; the only thing I can think of for production would be to disable the 3D content when the client lacks discrete graphics (which, I'm not actually sure whether that can be detected)
Edit: Here's something. You could probably hack something up that would check if the vendor name includes AMD or NVIDIA, or something. Might be fragile though https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGLRender...
The demo in the article would still run full speed on several year old integrated graphics. Probably chrome blacklisted his gpu driver and it's doing pure cpu rendering (or else his driver itself is bugged in a way that is killing the performance).
Ah, yeah, it's running smooth on my MBP without switching to discrete
FWIW it’s zippy as hell on my iPhone 11 Pro.
The iPhone/iPad GPU's are actually faster than the Intel MacBooks in my experience. I haven't tried an M1 yet, but hopefully it eliminates this performance gap.
Ran perfectly fine on my Dell Precision with an i7-9850H.
Yes I understand that different hardware renders things at different speeds, thanks for your input? I'm saying that if something runs like shit on my $3,000 laptop I wouldn't be comfortable putting it into production for a user base that likely has, on average, far less.
Runs silky smooth on my 2015 MBP - it’s possibly a system specific issue
I'm saying the only thing running like shit is your overpriced laptop you goon
Same here. Probably the turbo encabulator on that XPS.
Very cool demo! And also nice to know my laptop fans still work. (2019 MBP 16", Chrome v84)
Maybe someday we can have geometry shaders in WebGL 3, so we can make nice adaptive LOD.
WebGPU might get geometry shaders.
https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/445
However, an issue is that many mobile GPUs don't support them.
Three.js has an imperative/stateful API for constructing and updating objects, not dissimilar to the DOM. So if your state lives in a separate place, then just like the DOM, you'd have to imperatively patch the view state to keep it in sync. Adding a layer that does this syncing automatically makes a lot of sense to me.
Doing it through React seems a little bit odd... but I haven't looked closely enough to understand why/whether this coupling is actually necessary
That makes sense, but it seems like a case of building an abstraction to solve a problem caused by another abstraction. If a scene graph creates a new chore for me that necessitates yet another dependency, i think it'd be simpler to not fuss with these layers at all. That's a choice i don't have with the DOM.
> i think it'd be simpler to not fuss with these layers at all
You should check out some example code for react-three-fiber (e.g. https://codesandbox.io/embed/r3f-bones-3i7iu). If you have any experience with writing raw webgl, it will become abundantly clear that something is gained by going through three.js before returning to React's more declarative style.
Most of the savings in the example are coming from three.js itself (not r3f), which is maybe the key point: three.js offers much more than a scenegraph, which is why it's worthwhile (check out the official examples to get an idea: https://threejs.org/examples/). Webgl as an API doesn't even really talk about 3d objects for the most part; the language it provides is primarily about moving data around in buffers. The difference in possible time savings in three.js vs webgl is on the level of writing in C vs an assembly language.
And once you're building an application with a non-trivial amount of state mutation (on which the view depends)—you're faced with the same dilemma as traditional web dev and the DOM, hence the desirability of react-three-fiber.
That said, I think it would be super interesting to see a three.js alternative that was 'natively' reactive/declarative, because I'll readily admit the tower of abstractions involved in writing a react-three-fiber app has its downsides. (Then again, I consider three.js to be a rare gem, know of nothing comparable in terms of simplicity/quality for building 3d apps, and would be [pleasantly] surprised to see anything like the above anywhere in the near future.)
Because of react's popularity, it's attractive to make a project that applies react's style of development to threejs.
Similarly, around 2013 threeQuery (threejs + jquery) was becoming somewhat popular too (it had a jquery "chain" api like syntax). It's good to see people experiment and attempt to improve developer efficiency. Who knows what new tricks will be discovered and what kind of benefit and new approaches will be created! However, I mostly agree with you.
I find threejs to be one of the most enjoyable libraries to work with (and its codebase is simple and beautiful too). I also highly recommend to everybody that wants to go into 3d graphics to dedicate some effort and learn the actual fundamentals (eg webgl, opengl, metal, matrix math, quaternions, etc). This way you gain domain specific knowledge that is applicable across platforms and across time. Abstractions are not future-proof, they are recycled and change according to the latest trends in development. Domain specific knowledge stays with you forever! If there is an intermediate ground on which people can meet (eg start with react-three or three.js and then dive deeper) that's a win too. Recently I have been advocating that web devs can start learning 3d graphic concepts by just playing with... CSS to familiarize with some of the concepts and then move from there. This way one can avoid all the overhead around the gl statemachines or various libs and focus on the basic concepts first
You don't really have the choice with graphics either. The GPU keeps mesh and texture data in memory between frames, and I would imagine something similar happens for lighting, etc at some layer in the pipeline. Reconstructing the entire scene every time would not be feasible.
Regardless: the reason for having a base API be imperative is usually because it's maximally flexible and performant. By your own admission, any reactive API for 3D rendering will at least have to hold on to references to GPU objects in-between iterations, which means it could never be a truly stateless API; it would always be an abstraction over something stateful.
So given that constraint, I think it's better for the base API not to hide that statefulness behind an abstraction, and to leave the abstracting to a higher-level API
that is not what is happening here. you can see the real difference here: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1282999626782650368
it allows you to create self-contained components. that alone will eradicate so much boilerplate and complexity. it has a real pointer event system. it takes care of managing the scene reactively, it disposes of objects it does not need any longer.
you use this for the same reason you would use react for the dom. r3f is not a wrapper that duplicates the threejs export catalogue, it is a renderer/reconciler.
Describing WebGL as immediate mode is a little misleading. The rendering is immediate but the API is definitively not. There is a ton of state that needs to be allocated up front, mutated rather than re-created, and eventually torn down. Buffers, textures, shaders, and uniforms are all retained state. There's also the whole OpenGL state machine.
OpenGL used to have a true immediate mode where you called a function for each triangle vertex, and you didn't need shaders or buffers. That mode is not present in WebGL.
Agreed. Haven't checked out the code but it might because of the text labels in the first example?
Last time I checked rendering text into a webgl context was basically reinventing harfbuzz or using a proper game engine like unity.
Edit: So a reactive way to lay over HTML which properly hooks into the 3d context doesn't sound beyond crazy, at least for web tech standards.
Unity?
Yup thanks, typo.
I believe React developers think in terms of Components now as we used to think of Object/modules in the past. I personally find it easier to encapsulate logic into a Component because it seems more tangible than a plain JS file/module. You can also nest React components to compose logic, for example: composing multiple shaders.
Yes, but they are using Three.js, which provides a scene graph structure, basically wrapping WebGL in a retained mode.
> That looks neat but why would you need a react-style reconciler to render a webgl scene? It's immediate mode...every frame is rendered according to the latest state available. What is even being reconciled?
You don't, it might be a case of VRML cargo-culting or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
While the DOM has some issues which makes React handy, Three.js and its "display list" have none of these problems, but I guess shoving React somewhere will translate in a better conversion for the authors of that article...
Here's the answer from the library author: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1282999626782650368/photo/...