Comment by rofko
4 hours ago
Hi there! This is not trying to be a three.js replacement, scenes with huge polygon counts naturally should render in canvas.
For me, the interesting case is smaller low-poly or voxel scenes where loading a full 3D stack may be overkill, and where keeping the scene in DOM/CSS gives you easier integration with normal layout, styling, events, etc. Once you have the HTML, you don't even need to load the library to render a static model.
Also, part of the experiment is testing the browser’s limits and getting a clearer sense of where this approach works, where it breaks down, and what the tradeoffs are.
Cheers!
ha, so you could run this on the server and send down a page with no javascript at all? (with, i assume, a static camera only.) that's fun. i mean, you could also just render the model to an image at that point, but still, this is neat.
You can have a dynamic camera with 3D CSS only and no JS. The trick is move the scene instead of the "camera". CSS Doom uses this technique (although unlike the project I'm working on, it relies heavily on JS for the interaction logic).
Then there's "minecraft in CSS" which uses invisible form elements for camera rotation and works with no JS at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100148 )
Yes, you can render on server and if you include CSS transitions/animations, you get an animated 3d render without the need for JS !
We haven't built it yet, but its on the roadmap
I'm all for experimentation but getting rid of JS in this case almost certainly results in worse performance. You're trading a bit of load time for significantly slower runtime/rendering.
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