threejs-app

Preact demo

(Preloader time has been inflated for demo purposes.)

My current organization for medium & large WebGL + UI apps (i.e. must scale to a large team and run the course of a few months).

⚛ This version includes Preact for scalable UI components and a simple way of communicating between Preact and WebGL. See the master branch for an easier boilerplate that does not include all the Preact/UI features.

This is by no means stable; you probably shouldn't just go cloning it and trying to build your own apps. It is really opinionated and has a lot of things that might seem odd or overkill (though I have found them necessary on most big projects). Instead, you may just want to study it to see if you can find anything of interest.

The core WebGL features:

• Basic ThreeJS setup with render loop, camera, resize events, controls, tap events, GLTF loader, etc.
• Budo for quick dev cycle, source maps, etc
• Babel + ES2015 + bound class functions
• A few optimizations thrown in for smaller output bundle size
• glslify + glslify-hex transform
• shader-reload for live shader reloading during dev
• global access to canvas, dat.gui, camera, app width & height, controls, etc
• an AssetManager & preloader to keep texture/GLTF/etc code clean and avoid promise/async hell
• include NODE_ENV=production or development
• a simple way to organize complex ThreeJS scenes:
  • build them out of smaller "components", where each component extends THREE.Object3D, THREE.Group or THREE.Mesh
  • functions like update(dt, time), onTouchStart(ev, pos), etc propagate through entire scene graph

In addition, this preact branch includes things such as:

• Preact, obviously
• Sets up a Preloader section before WebGL has loaded
• LESS with fast style updates (no browser reload)
• Example of handling reactive updates in WebGL land
  • See onAppDidUpdate in src/webgl/scene/Honeycomb.js
• Component animations and section transitions with GSAP + Promises (gsap-promise) and preact-transition-group
• A tool to scaffold new components/sections:
  • Run npm run component MyComponent to create the new component MyComponent
  • Run npm run section MySection to create a new section MySection

At some point many of these tools will be published on npm or as self-contained scripts, making this whole thing a bit more convenient. Until then... enjoy the mess! :)

Usage

Clone, npm install, then:

# start development server
npm run start

Now open localhost:9966 and start editing your source code. Edit the honey.frag or honey.vert to see it reloaded without losing application state.

You can launch localhost:9966/?gui to open dat.gui.

For production:

# create a production bundle.js
npm run bundle

# deploy to a surge link for demoing
npm run deploy

For deploy to work, you will need to change the surge URL in package.json "scripts" > "deploy" field to something else.

Confused?

Yeah, this "boilerplate" is not easy, and is much more challenging than the master branch (which is mostly just WebGL). Unfortunately I haven't found a smoother workflow with tools like Webpack, Parcel, Rollup, etc. Things like JSX, Babel, DOM animations, WebGL, CSS pre-processors, npm modules, etc is all really hard to get working together, and the result is lots of boilerplate code to get things up and runnning.

One day I hope frontend Web will be a little more like Processing GUI — just "code and go" — but until then I hope you find some ideas in this repo. 😄

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.