Threejs

Didn’t make a lot of progress today and decided to play around with shapes instead. Here’s a heart -> https://codepen.io/shortdiv/pen/zYxGQBm?editors=1010

Geometry is the basis for drawing any shape in ThreeJS. As I covered in earlier posts, geometry in ThreeJS consists of vertices and faces, which can be defined by hand in order to create custom geometry. Of course, this task of defining your own vertices and faces is ambitious and requires a firm understanding of how math works in ThreeJS—knowledge which I currently do not have. To keep things simple, ThreeJS offers default 3D shapes known as primitives so you don’t have to grok geometry to generate common shapes like spheres and cubes. ...

Most shapes in ThreeJS and WebGL can be created using primitives many of which, you can use to create composite geometries, like this really neat christmas tree. Creating complex and unique geometries however takes effort and can be difficult to achieve by simply compositing, mutating and ”extruding” existing primitives in ThreeJS. A better approach, as I highlighted in a previous post, is to utilize the methods like Geometry in ThreeJS that give you the flexibility of defining vertices and faces for custom polyhedrons. In addition to this, ThreeJS also offers support for working with curves and smooth surfaces. ParametricGeometry is example of such a method that gives you the ability to work with parametric surfaces, or surfaces which extend the idea of parametrized curves (fancy terms for bézier curves) to vector-valued functions of two variables—from my understanding this basically means a 3D non straight surface. ...

Walking at angles When drawing in 3D and even in 2D, we rely on shapes to make up a larger geometry, which then go on to form a more complex scene. This may seem rather straightforward but to a machine the task of drawing shapes could not be more complicated. This is largely because most machines only know how to render triangles. Take the humble square. Ordinarily, a square is drawn from point to point around the perimeter of the square, so in the figure below we’d draw a square from 1 → 2 → 3 → 4. From a computer’s perspective however, drawing a square would go 1 → 2 → 4 → 3. ...

Because we’re starting from the basics, this week we’ll focus largely on shapes and rendering shapes to the screen. This task may seem trivial but I assure you there’s a lot happening to occupy a week’s worth of content. To keep things simple, we’ll create our 3D images using ThreeJS, a JS library that abstracts a lot of the complexities of WebGL so you can write graphics with the power of JavaScript! ...

At the start of 2018, I got the opportunity to be part of the first mini batch at the Recurse Center. Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven programming retreat in NYC aimed at attracting programmers who want to grow their programming chops in a rigorous yet, supportive environment. Students who attend Recurse generally come in with a dedicated project focus. This helps with setting a course and creating a clear purpose through the course of the term, which lasts anywhere between 1 week and six months. During my time at Recurse, which lasted one week (hence mini), I focused on ramping up on WebGL. While 1 week was far too short to get anywhere near mastery, it did give me the space and time to navigate the vastness of core WebGL concepts and chart a semblance of a path to eventual mastery. If you’re curious about this and my learnings from my rather short stint there, check out my musings over on Github as well as my experiments with WebGL/GLSL—the furthest I got was rotating a triangle. ...