Three.js: JavaScript 3D engine for canvas, svg, and WebGL | Hacker News Reader

Three.js: JavaScript 3D engine for canvas, svg, and WebGL

github.com

93 pointshelium25 comments

The demos are really mind-blowing. Stuff that I never expected to come so fast to the browser are becoming a reality. This is really exciting stuff for me. I will definitely use some of these libraries (linked to from the page) in a few upcoming canvas based projects.

http://www.learningwebgl.com is an incredible site for learning about webgl. Here is a list of WebGL frameworks listed on their wiki: http://learningwebgl.com/cookbook/index.php/Main_Page (scroll to the bottom)

I'm personally using O3D right now. I've heard good things about the others such as GLGE

how are you going about learning o3d? it seems like the documentation effort stopped when they switched to webgl.

Well, the docs are a little out of date but most of it works as it did before. I had about 3 lines to change when I started using the webgl version. (details of what needs change is available here: http://code.google.com/p/o3d/wiki/GettingStarted)

Some parts are not yet implemented but I've managed to get work done without using any of them. The core devs are often on the mailinglist: http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss

The repos are active, last update was last week. I just use whatever they have in SVN right now, the packages on their webstite is very outdated.

I'm getting 60 fps approximately for the spinning cube with chrome 6 on Ubuntu Lucid and my laptop has a core i3 with built in arrandale based GPU, not an nvidia or ati one.

Not long ago, on an older laptop, I was getting the same fps for native Linux apps. Seems browsers are acquiring native capabilities, but at a faster rate :)

The 'Example's section aren't using your GPU, they're all using CanvasRenderer it seems.

It seems to be capped at 60FPS. But it's the simplest demo, my results for the others are nowhere near 60FPS, most aren't even usable unfortunately.

I get 1FPS on the terrain generation one. Still cool :)

I suspect you're using MacOS? Chrome/Safari on MacOS perform horribly slow on some of these demos. CoreGraphics seem to be the culprit.

For some reason I'm getting horrible crashes on my app (has worked great for months. Still works great on Linux and Windows) since chrome switched to gpu rendering for everything. I haven't found the issue yet but it's really odd.

Did you already try to update GPU driver?

I had really bad crashes (high pitch noise, bright white flash, driver killed) on Firefox 4 and Chrome 7 when they started to use HW acceleration and problems went away after the update.

Though this was on Windows 7, no idea about OSX.

No luck on that, I checked and there was in fact a graphics update but that didn't affect the behavior. My next step is to try to figure out what is causing it to make a bug report.

None of them seem usable on firefox.

Oh, most of them are, but the ones with textures seem to be awfully slow (the earth one for instance). Works nice in chromium though.

I guess that has to do with hardware acceleration. FF3.x does not have that yet, so it's falling back to software rendering SVG's, and software rendering is.. you know, awfully slow.

Try the FF4 beta if you want to see how things shape up, I think that has HW acceleration built in, though I'm not sure how far they are with WebGL.

fwiw, i managed 61 fps on a karmic machine w/ i7.

and out of curiosity i tried a froyo powered device (droid 2.2) and got up to 26 fps.

I think they could improve the speed if they used webworker

I really only glanced at the code so I could be wrong here. But it appeared to me as though the main loop was written with something like, 1000 / 60, which was probably intended to cap at 60fps.

If you took that code and modified the loop to run more frequently, do you get even better performance?

Yea - there's a great project using this for parametric 3D design in the browser: http://CloudScad.com. Has the ability to produce 3D printable files too.

What's really crazy is how well these demos work on my Android phone.

mrdoob is a genius

Excellent Demos. The speeds these browser implementations are reaching are far better than I originally expected us to be at this point.

can i make 3-d surface plots with this library? are there any alternatives to facilitate that?

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