threejsfundamentals.org

This is the first article in a series of articles about three.js. Three.js is a 3D library that tries to make it as easy as possible to get 3D content on a webpage.

Three.js is often confused with WebGL since more often than not, but not always, three.js uses WebGL to draw 3D. WebGL is a very low-level system that only draws points, lines, and triangles. To do anything useful with WebGL generally requires quite a bit of code and that is where three.js comes in. It handles stuff like scenes, lights, shadows, materials, textures, 3d math, all things that you'd have to write yourself if you were to use WebGL directly.

These tutorials assume you already know JavaScript and, for the most part they will use ES6 style. See here for a terse list of things you're expected to already know. Most browsers that support three.js are auto-updated so most users should be able to run this code. If you'd like to make this code run on really old browsers look into a transpiler like Babel. Of course users running really old browsers probably have machines that can't run three.js.

When learning most programming languages the first thing people do is make the computer print "Hello World!". For 3D one of the most common first things to do is to make a 3D cube. So let's start with "Hello Cube!"

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