Three.js - Javascript 3D Engine

It's funny how many JS-related projects choose nondescript names like this. Off the top of my head: "processing", "underscore", "node", "backbone", "mylibrary", and (maybe the one that started it all) "prototype". I caught myself doing it after I named one of my js libraries "coordinate". I'm not suggesting "three.js" is a bad name--it's simple, and I'll probably remember it. It's just an interesting naming trend.

I made a gcode render in three.js last summer and although three.js worked as advertised it's canvas rendering was by no means optimized. It was quite slow for complex geometry so the whole fall-back to canvas strategy won't be terribly useful for any even moderately 3d intense applications.. And then there's Firefox, oh the horrors of canvas's performance in Firefox 3.x.

CloudSCAD gets away with it AFAIK because generally OpenSCAD is not generating overly complicated models. However once you convert those polygons into stacks of infill and perimeter lines (a la gcode) you really begin to see the limits of three.js's canvas rendering setup.

Heres an example of rendering 2d gcode (simple enough that it doesn't crash most PCs in Chrome or FF4): http://www.d1plo1d.com/cad_canvas/examples/gcode_canvas.html (same controls as emc2 axis)

src: https://github.com/D1plo1d/CadCanvas

TL;DR: canvas support can be horrifically laggy but otherwise three.js is good things.

This has been great for we 3D printing enthusiasts - Tony Buser's CloudScad uses three.js

http://cloudscad.com/pages/stl_viewer

So many possibilities. Mr. Doob continues to amaze.

I just made this - a parametric sculpture generator for Minecraft - using Three.js: http://bit6.net/minetricks/minetricks.html